By Adam Sisman
Narrated by Seán Barrett
Published by Profile Books Audio profilebooks.com @ProfileBooks
208 pages (4 hours 29 minutes) ISBN 9781800818088
Publication date 19 October 2023
I was allowed access to an audio review copy on Net Galley https://www.netgalley.com/ @NetGalley. Thanks to the Author and Publisher for organising this.
The cover
Dull, dull, dull. Photograph of David Cornwell (John le Carré) in a gabardine coat and trilby carrying a geography teacher’s briefcase. An attempt to portray him like a low-grade civil servant?
The narration
Seán Barrett is one of my favourite audiobook narrators, whose appeal is not in a myriad of voices and accents but more the warm quality of voice, his delivery and timing. This makes him an ideal narrator for a work like this.
My thoughts
I am not a fan of biographies, I read perhaps one a year and I have not read the author’s previous well received biography on John le Carré. What drew me here was the fact that it was dealing with the private world of a seemingly very private man and was approved by his son. In it the author explains how it came about, its plan to be seen as an annex, then a follow up, with its long gestation period. David Cornwell himself appears to have been ambivalent about certain things being written about him once he had passed on, but his son wanted it publishing to provide an insight into his fathers writing. The result is jaw-droppingly shocking at times, though never overly salacious, but does go a long way to explaining his body of work since the late 1960’s.
My first exposure to the work of le Carré was as a fifteen-year-old in 1979 when the BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy aired for the first time. I had read Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and around that period Brian Freemantle’s Charlie Muffin, but here was something more realistic. Throughout the 1980s I read the le Carré back catalogue and came to appreciate he was the consummate cold war espionage writer and in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold he had written the definitive novel of the genre. By the time he wrote the partly autobiographically inspired A Prefect Spy his style seem to be changing becoming more literary and the page quantity increasing. Then following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death (perhaps more accurately coma judged on recent events) of the cold war he had to search for new inspiration. His books were still very good but like when Dylan went from acoustic to electric, some readers will prefer one period over the other. For me the interesting thing would be how this book would colour my view of his work.
Cornwell was a low-level spook posted to Germany when he started writing and having affairs even with the wives of his colleagues. It was the world-wide success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold which prove to his breakthrough, allowing him to become a full-time writer and move into the big league of international best sellers. From this point there was no stopping him in both a literary and womanising sense.
The book is meticulously researched from first hand sources, both in person and through correspondence, making this a serious work, not some tawdry kiss and tell. The author has also shown great sensitivity towards the women concerned, keeping the anonymity of some and ensuring content has been approved. As the author remarks he probably knows Cornwell as much as any man alive and it appears that he has tried to create as honest a portrayal of the man as he was able. So, what do we learn?
Well, he was a liar throughout his life, saying what though he needed to at the time, and certainly never spared friends or family. We discover his father was a conman which had some influence as did his stint in espionage where betrayal is their everyday bread and butter, but there is much more to it than this that we never quite get to the bottom of. Certainly, the constant lies and betrayal are themes throughout his work, as is the situation where the only way out seems to be suicide.
His philandering was unusual and serious. They usually weren’t mere dalliances or casual sex, but full blown ‘love affairs’ with periods of wooing and much secret correspondence. The woman all appear to have been younger, much younger, several being half his age, and many seemed to be content with the arrangement. There was the power imbalance of the older rich man with the younger woman but on the face of it not coercive control, these women were willing partners seemingly charmed by him. One thing made clear is how much of these women and their experiences comes through in the individual books. It is suggested that each one was a muse, one he needed to inspire him to write, only to be discarded for the next novel. A fascinating observation that on the face of it appears to hold some truth.
The amusing aspect of the book is the description of how he conducted the many affairs by employing ‘tradecraft.’ Coded address books, cut outs and dead letter drops all figure as does a secret credit card held by his Swiss publicist. Was this a game, a substitute for spying? Despite all this his two wives got to know of his affairs, it seems that there were simply so many that it would have been impossible not to. His treatment of his wives seems to be somewhat callous (I qualify this comment here having not read the biography for a fuller picture) to the extent that I wonder why they remained with him.
They say never meet your heroes, this being no exception, just try to separate the man from his work. This book certainly opened my eyes to the man he was and goes a long way to explain some of the connections to his work, which for me still represents the pinnacle of the genre.
The Secret Life of John le Carré goes a long way to explain the true man behind the pen name, honest without being salacious but a strangely fitting testimony.
The author
Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the biographer of John Le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among his other works are two volumes of letters by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews.
Source: Publisher’s website
The narrator
Barrett (born 4 May 1940 in Hampstead, London, England, UK) is an English actor and voice actor.
In the early 1980s, Barrett went on to voice acting. He has performed the voices of Tik-Tok in Return to Oz, a Goblin in Labyrinth, Big Mac and other characters in TUGS, Thadius Vent’s soothsayer Goodtooth in Oscar’s Orchestra, Melchoir in the English dubbed version of the Lapitch the Little Shoemaker TV series, Roly the Pineapple in the English version of The Fruities and UrSu the Dying Master and UrZah the Ritual-Guardian in The Dark Crystal as well as additional characters in two video games The Feeble Files and Viking: Battle for Asgard. He also provided the voice for Captain Orion in Star Fleet, the English version of the 1980s Japanese puppet series X-Bomber.
He also narrated Fair Ground!, Timewatch and Dark Towers for BBC, dubbed voices in many anime films such as Roujin Z, Cyber City Oedo 808 and Dominion: Tank Police and has done voices for several audiobooks and radio stations.
In 1996, he was the narrator for the Channel 4 documentary series, Black Box. The series primarily concentrated on commercial aviation accidents, and the investigations related to them.
Barrett also worked as part of an ADR Loop Group on Aardman’s first computer-animated film Flushed Away, a voice director on Lapitch the Little Shoemaker and a dialogue director on The Fruities. He has also narrated episodes of the BBC TV series People’s Century and Dancing in the Street, as well as a number of BBC nature documentaries in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In 2011, he voiced Andre of Astora, Petrus of Thorolund and Ingward in Dark Souls.
Source: Goodreads profile
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