Even in his first cold-war novels, le Carré’s dramatization of espionage wasn’t realistic in any simple sense. And the misinterpretation of le Carré’s work as realism is a hallmark of the critical response to genre fiction - an odd response, given that genre fiction is by definition a highly stylized, often quite abstract depiction of worlds that have frequently never existed.
That le Carré still expresses his characters’ inner lives in such difficult, surprisingly constructed sentences is only a continuation of the promise made early in his career. Aware of this, perhaps, Taylor had grown a trivial moustache, like a scrawl on a photograph, which made a muddle of his face without concealing its shortcoming.” This is, after all, the writer who, in “The Looking Glass War,” described a protagonist as having “that kind of crumpled, worried face which is only a hair’s breadth from the music halls and yet is infinitely sad: a face in which the eyes are paler than their environment and the contours converge upon the nostrils. But in response one could point out that le Carré has always made his novels work through a dense, often cryptic linguistic reality.
le Carré’s prose that isn’t justified by the somewhat simplistic inevitability of his plot.” Writing about “The Night Manager” in The New York Review of Books, David Remnick argued that “le Carré is having no less difficulty finding his bearings in the new world than the aristocrats and politicians he has always skewered.”īoth criticisms are telling.
In his review of “The Russia House,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times detected a “murky complexity to Mr. TWO persistent critical judgments have shadowed John le Carré’s huge career: verbosity and, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an inability - or unwillingness - to depict our contemporary world in a realistic fashion.
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