The Pigeon Tunnel
“The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over several rounds of fine scotch. The collection leaves the impression of a man who has. “The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over several rounds of fine scotch. The collection leaves the impression of a man who has gone to impossible lengths for his words, bringing the farthest reaches of the globe, some of its cruelest inhabitants, and a small handful of genuine heroes. In many ways, The Pigeon Tunnel reminded me of a British version of James Michener’s Tales From the South Pacific, the stories taking place Europe, Asia, the Mideast, and Africa, instead of the South Pacific. But the flavor of the stories had a similar feel. “The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over.
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life by John le Carré; Viking, 320 pp., $28
One evening in the early 1960s, MI6 intelligence officer David Cornwell was killing time at a bar inside London City Airport before catching a flight back to his post in Bonn. A gruff-looking man appeared and asked the bartender for a whiskey. The stranger finished his drink quickly and walked off, concluding a brief and utterly forgettable encounter that nonetheless ignited Cornwell’s imagination. “There was a deadness in the face,” Cornwell later told The Paris Review. “It was the embodiment, suddenly, of somebody that I’d been looking for … I never spoke to him, but he was my guy, Alec Leamas, and I knew he was going to die at the Berlin Wall.”
The resulting 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, catapulted John le Carré (Cornwell’s nom de plume) into the literary stratosphere, where he has remained ever since. Espionage is le Carré’s lodestar, but don’t mistake him for just another scribbler of airport paperbacks; his novels—23 so far—exemplify that most coveted of literary achievements: deeply serious, insightful, and deftly written works that also happen to be international bestsellers.
In the early pages of his latest offering, one of le Carré’s rare forays into nonfiction, we find him sitting at his writing desk in the mountaintop Swiss chalet he bought with the windfall from The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Less a memoir than a disparate collection of reminiscences, The Pigeon Tunnel contains what le Carré calls “tiny bits of history caught inflagrante,” all of them borrowed from the lived experience of a novelist whose career has more closely resembled that of a war correspondent than a literary celebrity.
Le Carré left the intelligence business in 1964 to devote himself more fully to writing, but his life has been no less of an adventure for that. The Pigeon Tunnel reads like outtakes from a reporter’s notebook, which makes sense, given le Carré’s globetrotting creative process. Early in his career, he relied solely on his imagination for characters and settings. But after an outdated Hong Kong guidebook sabotaged the authenticity of a chase scene in his 1974 novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré resolved that he would never again write about a place he hadn’t visited. “The lesson I had learned wasn’t just about research,” he writes. “It told me that in midlife I was getting fat and lazy and living off a fund of past experience that was running out. It was time to take on unfamiliar worlds.”
And he did just that, trotting off to Cambodia and Vietnam with Washington Post correspondent David Greenway. Not more than a couple of weeks after the guidebook snafu, he writes, “I was lying scared stiff beside [Greenway] in a shallow foxhole, peering at Khmer Rouge sharpshooters embedded on the opposite bank of the Mekong River. Nobody had ever shot at me before.” Over the next 40 years, in the tradition of his friend and fellow MI6 alumnus Graham Greene, le Carré traveled the world in search of characters to populate his pages—to Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Russia, Panama, Kenya, and eastern Congo.
Along the way, he was shot at, yes, but also feted and often, either on the strength of his books or on the incorrect assumption that he maintained ties to British intelligence, allowed access to some of the world’s wariest people. Heads of state, former spymasters, mobsters, arms traffickers, warlords, mercenaries, and terrorists—they crowd le Carré’s recollections just as they do his novels. In the early 1980s, for example, hoping to be assured of safe passage in Beirut to research The Little Drummer Girl (1983), le Carré met with Yasser Arafat at the Palestinian leader’s secret hideout. Convinced of the novelist’s good intentions, Arafat granted the request and sealed the deal with a ceremonial embrace and kiss. “The beard is not bristle, it’s silky fluff,” le Carré writes, remembering his amazement. “It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder.” Such were the small yet crucial bits of intimate detail with which he constructed stories that were, as much as possible, true to life and that continue to stand head and shoulders above other works of genre fiction.
Spies are le Carré’s preferred subject, but through them he grapples with larger human truths that transcend the cloak-and-dagger underworld. Like his novels, The Pigeon Tunnel addresses questions of loyalty, love, and betrayal, the limits of suffering, and the inevitability of conflict. In this world, le Carré writes, “the harder you looked for absolutes, the less likely you were to find them.” But then, absolutes are boring, aren’t they? The same could never be said of le Carré’s novels—or as The Pigeon Tunnel demonstrates, of the man himself.
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One of John le Carré’s boyhood memories is clutching his mother’s hand while waving to his father, who stood high up behind a prison wall. Ronnie Cornwell was a charming rogue, a confidence man who ran frauds and visited jails all over the world. He once sent the teenage le Carré to St. Moritz to talk a hotel manager out of an overdue bill — “and while you’re there, have yourself a steak on your old man.” Yet his love for his sons overflowed in guilty tears, and his longest con was to finagle expensive private educations for them. (He later sent a bill.) As for waving to him in prison, however, Cornwell insisted that le Carré had misremembered. Cornwell had done a stretch at Exeter Jail, yes — but everyone knows that at Exeter you can’t see into the cells from the road.
Is the memory real? This question in various forms drives le Carré’s remarkable memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carré began his career working for British intelligence and went on to revolutionize the intrigue genre with over twenty intricately wrought novels, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy andThe Constant Gardener. Now eighty-four, he finds that pure memory is elusive “after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.” He believes what his father said, but he also knows that after that remembered day, a part of him never saw Cornwell wearing anything but a convict’s uniform. One of the most haunting scenes of the book recounts the way the otherwise exuberant Cornwell would stand meekly at doors, waiting for them to be opened. As a prisoner, he had not been able to do this himself. And yet this memory is filtered as well: it comes secondhand, from le Carré’s mother, who abandoned him in childhood and was an enigma thereafter. It, too, is clouded by time’s opaque haze.
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My LifeHardcover$28.00
The Pigeon Tunnel is an episodic rather than a chronological memoir, jumping from scene to scene in le Carré’s fascinating life. The deeply affecting chapter on Cornwell is not merely the best part of the book, it may well be the best thing le Carré has ever written. Other sections are less personal. Le Carré avoids writing about his marriages, friendships, and children, focusing instead on the relationship between his work as a spy and his chosen life as a novelist. The two careers have much in common with one another and with his father’s line of work, he asserts, not least because they involve a complicated relationship to the truth. “To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing.”
The Pigeon Tunnel Summary
Parts of this book sing a little too much. Asme pp stamp. Fans of le Carré’s intricate novels will recognize here his jargon-filled, world-weary dialogue and suspect embellishment. Such dialogue fills the chapter on spymaster Nicholas Elliott, who interviewed the traitor Kim Philby after Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Similarly, le Carré seems to make a good story even better as he recounts trying to collect a debt for his father from the Panamanian ambassador to France at age sixteen. He writes that the ambassador’s wife, “the most desirable woman I had ever seen,” played footsie with him under the table and then nibbled on his ear as they danced into the night. Such print-ready scenes are evocative but not entirely believable, and once again implicate the fraught relationship between memory and the creative act. Le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman contends that le Carré “enjoys teasing his readers, like a fan dancer, offering tantalizing glimpses, but never a clear view of the figure beneath.”An air of mystery suits a thriller writer — especially one who used to be a spy.
The Pigeon Tunnel Le Carre
The Pigeon Tunnel shows that le Carré is at his best not when he renders scenes or snappy dialogue but when he simply observes. He has a marvelous eye. His diplomatic cover in the 1960s required him to escort dignitaries from place to place, including translating for a German politician meeting with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister’s “patrician slur . . . was like an old gramophone record running at a very low speed,” le Carré writes. “A trail of unstoppable tears leaked from the corner of his right eye, down a groove and into his shirt collar.” Le Carré briefly describes his great-grandfather, “whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety.” Best of all is a surreal meeting with Yasser Arafat, which occurred while le Carré researched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a novel. As they embraced, le Carré sized up his man, whose brown eyes were “fervent and imploring.” Arafat’s famously patchy beard “is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder.”
The Pigeon Tunnel Stories From My Life
The meeting with Arafat illustrates a central concern of le Carré’s working life: his commitment to research. It is an ironic preoccupation for a self-confessed fabulist. Although his early spying looms large in the public imagination, le Carré has gathered far more material for his novels during civilian trips to dangerous places. Many of the memoir’s chapters recount these adventures. He spent time in the eastern Congo and Khmer Rouge Cambodia; he interviewed Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern terrorists. In every town he tried to find the watering hole where spies, diplomats, journalists, and men of fortune sought comfort and camaraderie. These settings and characters worked their way not just into his fiction but into his consciousness; they have set his novels apart from all other stories of intrigue. “An old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination,” he confesses, late in this book. And among John le Carré’s many talents, a splendid imagination looms large.