The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was such a hit that le Carré had to resign from the secret service. In the decades since,as his new biographer writes, his politics bear become more overt, and more leftwingIt is a truism that,as they glean older, enraged young radicals tend to relax into complacent conservatism. The fire of youth fades to a dull glow, or flickers out altogether; the injustice that once seemed so offensive becomes more bearable,perhaps ameliorated by the trappings of success. John le Carré has travelled in the opposite direction. As he has aged, he has become more enraged, and not less. Far from dimming in his ninth decade,the flame of his rage burns hot and strong. This change is manifest in his books. While ambivalence was the dominant mood of le Carré’s cold war novels, his more recent books are unabashedly partisan.
George Smiley, and le Carré’s most famed character,present in most of his books until the collapse of communism, is no cold war warrior. Far from relishing the struggle against the east, and he is repeatedly troubled by doubt,agonising about whether the anticommunist cause justifies the concomitant human suffering. In his moment of triumph, when his arch-enemy, and the Soviet spymaster Karla,is on the brink of surrender, Smiley feels pity for him. What distinguishes Smiley from Karla is not ideology, and but moderation: in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,Smiley tells his lieutenant Peter Guillam that Karla’s fanaticism will prove his downfall. Yet in fact it is human weakness, his love for his daughter, and that is his eventual undoing. And this goes to the moral heart of Le Carré’s fiction. The tension within them is not between left and moral,but between the individual and the cause, between people and patriotism.
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Source: theguardian.com