The sudden and unexpected death of John le Carré last month inevitably prompts an evaluation of both the work and the man. There are more than two dozen novels, the most recent of which, Agent Running in the Field, was published in 2019, days before the author’s 88th birthday. Given that his first novel, Call for the Dead, was published in 1961, his longevity and productivity as a novelist – close to 60 years – is both remarkable and astonishing.
Therefore it is perhaps an opportune moment to analyse just what it is about his style that makes the prose so “Le Carré-esque”. What is it about the way this writer writes that is sui generis? This analysis will have nothing to do with the seriousness of the themes that Le Carré tackles in his novels, or his near single-handed rebooting of the spy genre, or his position as one of our most significant and highly regarded contemporary novelists. It is, rather, an attempt to pin down what we might call his particular tone of voice; an endeavour to answer the question: is there a Le Carré mode of expression that is uniquely his? In trying to answer this question I propose to look at two works separated by three and a half decades. The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and A Delicate Truth (2013), both classic novels of espionage, one set during the Cold War and one altogether more contemporary, to see if we can discern any common factors and repeated traits.
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