Le Carré has dined with presidents and prime ministers, but Cornwell prefers a private life at the edge of society. Sisman’s Cornwell is a man who has projected himself as a writer of genius while fearing that he’s his silver-tongued, small-town conman of a father’s son. On this analysis, Le Carré is like the Russian doll that introduced the TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: an enchanting hybrid of sphinx and tease. They are not the real thing.”įrom the outset, Sisman has had to negotiate with a subject whose first instinct is to seduce those who come close to him within a wilderness of mirrors, in which vanity reflects insecurity reflects pride. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. His own website even boasts a Prospero-like indifference to the truth: “Nothing that I write is authentic. Le Carré is a romantic “lost boy” whose appetite for telling his own story can only be satisfied by enthralling reinvention. Besides, 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.

Sisman, justly acclaimed for writing about the dead (AJP Taylor Hugh Trevor- Roper), must have known what he was risking, but possibly underestimated the fathomless complexity of his subject. The upshot is a fascinating truce between candour and guile. In the end, the writer’s approaching rendezvous with oblivion tipped the balance, and he struck a deal with Adam Sisman. Surely, it was said, 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. Quite a few Le Carré watchers believed that his complicated alter ego would never surrender to the biographer’s torments.

John le Carré (aka David Cornwell), who knows this only too well, has been flirting with the idea of his biography since 1989, with many second and third thoughts. I n literature, posterity is the name of the game.

Adam sisman john le carre