Resident Book Review of “The Secret Life of John le Carré”

Charlestown resident Ed Appel will review “The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman [New York: Harper, 2023]” on Tuesday, May 21, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. in the Auditorium.

Adam Sisman’s exposé, The Secret Life of John Le Carré (Harper, 2023) is a sequel to his JohnLe Carré: The Biography (Harper, 2015). Sisman’s Le Carré (“John the Square,” pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, 1931-2020), imagines a bent spy who betrays spouses, lovers, service – “the Circus,” – and, while he’s at it, country.  Cornwell’s best-selling 26 novels, 10 films, TV and radio shows and numerous international awards are stage props.

In The Secret Life, the ageing, handsome, rich but troubled Cornwell uses spycraft and well-practiced charm to act out the life of his shifty characters derived from betrayed wives, lovers and friends.  The Biography omits 11 affairs that Cornwell forbade Sisman to chronicle until after his death.

 Cornwell: “Infidelities…are almost a necessary drug for my writing.”

Sisman’s harsh light illuminates Cornwell’s dark sides like a pathologist completing an autopsy.  Cornwell, abandoned at five by his mother, was raised by a grifter father between incarcerations.  While he was a British intelligence officer undercover as a diplomat in Germany, Le Carré wrote his best-selling The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, launching his fulltime writing career.

Adam Sisman, a British writer, editor and biographer, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his second book, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task.

Cornwell then accepted Sisman’s proposal to write his biography over several years.  Sisman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor of the University of St Andrews.

Ed Appel, a writer, retired FBI executive and consultant, is a Charlestown volunteer who previously reviewed Le Carré’s last spy novel, Silverview and two other books.