The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

I was aware that David Cornwell—the man the reading and moviegoing public know as John Le Carre—worked as a spy and a diplomat. This series of vignettes, published when he was 85, provide some wonderful glimpses into his family and other aspects of his life.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of real people on whom he based characters. I happen to have read A Most Wanted Man quite recently. I found it a bit hard to believe in a fugitive refugee who keeps insisting he will become a doctor in Germany, where his presence is illegal and he barely speaks the language. Imagine my astonishment on learning that this character was based on a real man. The Czech actor Vladimir Pucholt managed (with some help) to defect to the UK and train as a doctor. Later, he worked as a pediatrician in Toronto, where he retired after a distinguished career.

Learning something of Le Carre’s odd family was also quite fascinating. His mother, Olive, abandoned him when he was five to escape his con man fantasist father. Olive did not see her son again until he grew up and sought her out. He describes her as “painfully well-spoken” like “Mrs. Thatcher halfway through her elocution course.” Unable to achieve any closeness with his mum, her son describes her as “willing to be defined by whoever claimed to love her.” Socially acceptable—even expected—perhaps, for a woman of her class and times.

Le Carre’s father Ronnie was a charming but irredeemable crook desired to be “a cosmos of one.” Though he lied, cheated, stole, and was caught and jailed in more than one country, he was surrounded by a “court” who refused to hear a bad word about him.

Unsurprisingly, Le Carre found it hard to come to terms with with such a father. In spite of a lifetime habit of bumming money from his successful son, the author tells us that Ronnie “didn’t envy my literary career. He owned it.”

Of course, this was fantasy. In real life, he was at one point on the Wanted list in the UK and the US, daren’t use his passport, and lived under false names in a series of apartments he couldn’t pay for. Nevertheless he sallied forth each morning with nothing between himself and perdition but “animal wit and a double-breasted pinstripe from Berman of Savile Row,” which had to be home-pressed each evening.

After years of troubled relations between father and son, Le Carre describes how he finally came to terms with Ronnie by choosing to see his good side, along with his “misfortune to be an anachronism in his own lifetime.” More importantly, he sees a parallel between the father’s imaginitive conning and his own writerly art.