In the last hundred years – however, you know – things have changed. And yet The perfect spy it has such a caliber, to put it again in the language of those who deal with jewels and precious items, that it imposes itself on the attention of those who “judge and send according to who clings”; and it is also a book written with the evident intention of ending a game with friends and enemies by saying once and for all “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about himself. Which could appear rather problematic to the reader who is aware that he is dealing with a master of the double and the triple game, in life and in art.
The Authorized Biography of Adam Sisman
What Le Carré recounts in The perfect spy is reflected in the authorized biography of Adam Sisman, John le Carré: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2015). But you know: one thing is information – data, dates and facts – and another is narration, that is the game of mirrors, echoes and associations of ideas – the depths of the human heart – in the depths of which the reader he finds himself when he comes across books of a certain weight. The carats mentioned above.
The perfect spy it is emblematic but it is only one of the many artifacts of great value on display in the window of the precious “Gioielleria le Carré”, the quality of whose products – it must be said – it was the Americans, who even Le Carré never loved in primis.
In particular, The perfect spy takes a series of motifs – the timing of the narrative, the complexity of the architecture, the profile of the characters and their moral dilemmas – from the model of the Good soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Writer of whom at the time he had also had the opportunity to write: «I would like to be like him. Sitting and talking in front of the fireplace knowing that if the listener shakes in his chair, that’s just how things have to go. I am someone who tells stories and I know there are a lot of people who love to hear them told. “
In common with Ford, Le Carré also had a love for the German language and literature; and, in filigree, in the fabric of this almost improbable tour de force autobiographical, there is The adventurous Simplicissimus (1668) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen which is the code-book of the protagonist, the spy Magnus Pym, and a possible suggestion for us who read his story.