A Tale of the Acorn and the Tree a Perfect Spy

By R.Z. Sheppard

A Perfect Spy arrives in the U.S. with its cover blown. Published last month in the U.K., John le Carre's eleventh novel could hardly pass review without someone noting that the main character is a British intelligence officer, as was the author, and that another persona is a dead ringer for Le Carre's father, a notorious con man named Ronald Cornwell.

That Cornwell had two sons, Anthony, an advertising executive in New York City, and David, the best-selling novelist who signs himself John le Carre, is not news. Neither is the literary practice of hanging fiction on a framework of autobiography. What seems unusual is that the normally reticent Le Carre should so openly draw the parallels of his life and his art, as he did recently in a New York Times Magazine article.

Cynics might say that he did it for the publicity, and cynics might be right. But a fair reading of the novel suggests more complex motives. A Perfect Spy has all the strengths and some of the weaknesses of an extended emotional purge: intensity, authenticity, flashes of black humor, a tendency to camp on obsessions and nurse the morose. Le Carre's job is not easy. In order finally to put his father to rest with forgiveness and love, he must first disinter the scoundrel, who died in 1975. Draped in the same checkered past as Ronald Cornwell, Rickie Pym makes darting appearances as an amoral charmer whose lies and bad debts foreshadow the more convoluted betrayals of his son Magnus.

Magnus Pym shares much of the author's vita, including absentee parents, an unhappy public school education, academic success at Oxford, literary ambitions and a foreign-service job. But there is a speculative quality about the character. What if, Le Carre seems to suggest, David Cornwell did not break away from the murky world of cold war espionage to become an acclaimed writer? Might he have ended up like Magnus, middle-aged and distorted by a past that makes him good at his job but useless as a husband, friend and father?

The ironic burden of being a Perfect Spy is that the distinction is based on distortion. Masters of deceit, according to Le Carre, are borderline psychopaths. One of Magnus' colleagues speculates, "What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination." Pym's first wife Belinda contributes the observation, "He was a new man every day. He'd come home one person, I'd try to match him. In the morning he'd be someone else."

Le Carre excels at depicting this multitier personality. The most convincing dinner-party chatter, pillow talk and professional banter conceal howling secrets. Magnus' deepest one is that he is a double agent, a fact that becomes apparent about the same time readers realize they have fallen through the civilized surface of the novel. Betrayal comes naturally to Pym, himself the victim of bad faith and disappointments, revealed in flashbacks of youth, student days and beginnings as an operative.

The plot is a manhunt, both literal and psychological. Magnus vanishes, leaving his wife Mary and friend and fellow spy Jack Brotherhood to deduce his whereabouts. There is a false trail that seems to lead to Scotland; in fact, Pym is holed up as Mr. Canterbury in a Devon boardinghouse. He is fairly sure that his superiors know he has passed secrets to a Communist agent, an old school chum. But Magnus is not trying to escape; he is only buying time to write his story so that his family and friends will know the truth. In addition, Rickie Pym has just died, his corpse bobbing in a tub of ice water until funeral expenses can be scraped up. It is a grotesquely comic end for a man who built worthless paper empires and stood for Parliament while scandal swirled at his feet.

As Brotherhood closes in, Magnus sets the crooked record straight, or as straight as possible under the circumstances. There is much here about the routines of spying: keeping in touch with your "Joes," the odd assortment of informants who provide trade figures, truck movements and the seemingly meaningless details that may or may not add up to something back at the Firm's headquarters. Magnus' operations take him to Vienna, Prague and Washington, where he concludes that "no country was ever easier to spy on . . . no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence."

As is customary in a Le Carre novel, the odor of moral fatigue and middle-age burnout cling to every page. But Magnus' betrayals also smell of the cradle and the grave. His acts of treason are not rooted in greed or politics. They are delayed rebellions not only against a criminal father but against a system that appears only slightly better. "You have a lawyer's training, you have Czech language and Czech expertise," a personnel bureaucrat tells a reassigned spy. "More appropriately you have a thoroughly sleazy mind. Apply it . . . We expect terrible things of you." This sort of thing comes dangerously close to self-pity: the best and the brightest suffering the scorn of their intellectual inferiors. It is not a pretty picture, and no one paints it better than John le Carre.