![]() ''A Perfect Spy'' shows Pym going through his rites of initiation into the secret world in Bern, Vienna and Oxford where, as an undergraduate, he infiltrates left-wing student groups and sends reports to an agency in London about which But to the extent that his own early biography overlaps with that of Magnus Pym - the fictional double agent whoĬomes close to being his alter ego in the new book - the author can be said to have lifted the curtain that still conceals the way the declining imperial power set about in the post-World War II years to recruit bright young Englishmen For what exactly? Only the authorities and Cornwell could say for sure. It is, of all his books, the first to make direct use of his own experiences in what he calls ''the secret world'' and thus the one most likely to incur censorship from what remains the government, of all Western governments,ĭavid Cornwell would never put it this way - although John le Carré might, if he were projecting it as fiction - but it followed from my guess that one of Britain's best-established authors was daring the authorities to make themselves absurdīy prosecuting him under the Official Secrets Act. ''A Perfect Spy'' was not offered for clearance because Hampstead and on the rocky Cornish coast - the only interviews he would have, he said, on the new novel and its genesis - he deftly guided me to an informed guess. But in the hours of conversation I had with him at his homes in London's He is careful not to identify the departments that would normally have had to give their permission and careful, as well, not to declare the reason for his omission this time. New novel is the first of his thrillers not to have been submitted to his former employers in the British Government for clearance. ![]() ![]() Yet in his 11th novel - ''A Perfect Spy,'' just out in Britain and to be published in the United States in May -Cornwell steps out from behind le Carré, setting down pointers to his own past as never before. It is so also when you meet him, for David Cornwell - the creator of the le Carré mask and oeuvre -Ĭustomarily discloses himself the way his books disclose their plots: disarmingly, in artfully controlled stages, never entirely. Not only because of his presumed emergence from the shadowy world of Her Majesty's secret service and his multiple personae. T IS ALMOST TOO OBVIOUS TO POINT OUT, BUT THE man behind the novels of John le Carré has a lot in common with his characters. FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Le Carré's Toughest Case By JOSEPH LELYVELD
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