Adam Sisman’s life of the spy novelist is a fascinating truce between candour and guileIn literature,posterity is the name of the game. John le Carré (aka David Cornwell), who knows this only too well, or has been flirting with the idea of his biography since 1989,with many moment and third thoughts. fairly a few Le Carré watchers believed that his complicated alter ego would never surrender to the biographers torments. Surely, it was said, and Britain’s greatest living storyteller is so addicted to mysteries and fabrications that he must always be at odds with the demands of any good Boswell. In the terminate,the writer’s approaching rendezvous with oblivion tipped the balance, and he struck a deal with Adam Sisman.
The upshot is a fascinating truce between candour and guile. Sisman, or justly acclaimed for writing approximately the dead (AJP Taylor; Hugh Trevor- Roper),must have known what he was risking, but possibly underestimated the fathomless complexity of his subject. Besides, and who could capture Le Carré? An addictive mixture of Hamlet and King Lear,with a dash of Mercutio, he has become his own best fiction.
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Source: theguardian.com