Le Carré

The novelist John le Carré was recalling an encounter from a decade or so ago, as the cold war was receding into history, giving way to a new system of shadowy threats and uneasy alliances. Sir David Spedding, ill and retiring as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or M.I. 6, had come to visit him at his house in Cornwall, and they were talking about the changed realities of spying. “He told me, ‘You can’t imagine how disgusting our world has become,’ ” Mr. le Carré said. “And I accept that. It is a disgusting world.”

At 76, Mr. le Carré is snowy-haired, droll and courtly, speaking in perfect paragraphs and exuding the air of quiet privilege and distinguished manner of a retired statesman. If he chose to, he could still be producing crowd-pleasing books about his most famous spy, George Smiley, late of M.I. 6, or easing into a gracious old age of playing with his grandchildren, lunching at his club and resting on his laurels.

But he is still sharp, still fizzing with ideas, and fueled by a new righteous fury. He has become, if not exactly radicalized, then at least clearer about his political views and more willing to articulate them. His latest book, “A Most Wanted Man” (Scribner), speaks to one of his preoccupations: the excesses, as Mr. le Carré sees it, of American foreign policy and the immoral nature of the intelligence practices that underpin it.

The message in the book, his 21st, is embedded, as always, in an absorbing tale: of spies and maybe-spies, of divided loyalties, of corrupted innocence. The title character is a young Muslim refugee named Issa, who suddenly and illegally surfaces in Hamburg and falls under the care of an idealistic young female lawyer. But then he becomes the object of a nasty and ill-conceived tug of war among feuding factions of several Western intelligence agencies, which cannot agree on whether he is a broken man or a dangerous terrorist, or perhaps a bit of both.

There are no scenes of torture in “A Most Wanted Man,” but Issa, its once and perhaps future victim, lives perpetually under its shadow. The degradation of torture and the horror of practices like extraordinary rendition were themes that Mr. le Carré returned to again and again in a recent conversation, speaking over tea and butter cookies on an overcast day in the living room of his handsome Victorian house in Hampstead, North London.

“I know about interrogation,” he said, alluding to his days as a British spy in the 1950s. “I’ve done interrogations, and I can tell you this: By extracting information under torture, you make a fool of yourself. You obtain information that isn’t true. You receive names of people who are supposedly guilty and aren’t. You land yourself with a wild goose chase, and you miss what is being handed to you on a plate, and that is the possibility of bonding with someone and engaging with them and talking to them reasonably.”

Mr. le Carré was recruited as a spy while still a college student. Working for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat-cum-secret agent, he began writing thrillers under a pseudonym. (His real name is David Cornwell.) His earlier books had the cold war as their backdrop, and while he is not nostalgic for that time, he said it “was a softer world, of course, mine.”

“I probably lived in a charmed time,” he added. “The cold war was fought between people of the same culture. Basically, it was.”

“Of course, the Russians tortured wholesale,” he continued. But in his experience, “it was never the beginning of an option.”

“The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” the 1963 work that made Mr. le Carré’s name, upended the traditional spy thriller by portraying East and West as equally cynical and equally corrupt — two sides of the same tarnished coin. It can be argued that where the world once seemed black and white, Mr. le Carré saw gray, and that now that it seems gray, he sees black and white. He doesn’t concur, exactly, but explains it this way: His recent work, he says, has a “clearer confusion, perhaps — a more articulate pessimism.”

Mr. le Carré set “A Most Wanted Man” in Germany because of its explosive ethnic and religious mix, its strained debates over immigration and the turf-battling disarray of its intelligence services. Although his main characters were inspired by actual people — a drunken Scottish banker he knew in Vienna, now deceased; a Chechen national he met in Moscow; a freed and exonerated Turkish inmate of Guantánamo — they were just starting points.

“Characters don’t have counterparts in real life,” Mr. le Carré said. “I don’t think they do for any fiction writer, not really, not if you’re any good. You can pinch the furniture of a character, but you can’t pinch the energy systems.”

The book is full of fathers whose misdeeds echo down the generations. His own father was a larger-than-life con man who was either riding high with gangsters and starlets or running to escape from creditors and the law; his mother walked out on the family when young David was still a boy.

“I have a very strong memory of what was done to me as a child,” he said. “I know what it’s like to come out from under a maverick, fascinating, overlarge father, what it’s like to feel, as Issa did, motherless. These are very simple projections. You’re like an actor : ‘Where do I get my tears from?’ ”

Mr. le Carré has explored his relationship with his father often in his fiction, most nakedly in “A Perfect Spy” (1986). The book’s protagonist, Magnus Pym, is the son of a charlatan and thief who develops a defensive facility for lying easily — and who becomes a spy, his true identity lost beneath layers of alternative ones. Mr. le Carré wrote about his father in The New Yorker several years ago, a piece, perhaps, of the not-yet-written autobiography he has long talked of producing. Recently he published another snippet of memoir, recalling an incident from his early spying days to make a greater point about spies’ fallibility and the public’s credulity in trusting its intelligence services — “which, come to think of it, is how we went to war in Iraq,” he wrote.

Mr. le Carré has not visited the United States since the bombing of Afghanistan, which he called “a blood sacrifice,” and he hates President Bush’s foreign policy. His worst fictional villains tend to be American. But he says he has no grudge against the country itself.

“If I’m angry at America, I’m angry as a disenchanted romantic,” he said. “Of course, I’m not angry at America at all. My argument is not with the American people. It’s with the way they’ve been misled, which I consider monstrous.”

Mr. le Carré knows that he risks alienating his American readers with his politics. And while some reviewers certainly take him to task for writing “fiction as polemic,” as Joan Smith said in The Independent recently, others admire him for having the courage of his convictions.

“I don’t think he minds putting noses out of joint,” the British critic Sebastian Shakespeare said in an interview via e-mail. “He’s already got literary acclaim and a healthy bank balance, so he has nothing to lose, apart from a few disgruntled readers. That is a small price to pay if you are convinced the world is going to hell in a handcart and you want to get your message across.”

Otto Penzler, a publisher and editor and the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said that he and many of his customers read Mr. le Carré’s books “in spite of his politics.”

“I have always been offended by his moral relativism, and it’s only gotten worse in the last few books,” he said in a telephone interview. “But you’d have a hard time finding a better prose stylist writing in the English language, sentence by sentence.”

Several weeks ago, The Sunday Times of London published a profile of Mr. le Carré in which it seemed to quote him as saying that, as a spy, he had been tempted to defect to the Soviet Union. But Mr. le Carré said in a letter to the paper that his views had been misrepresented.

The point he was making, he said, was that “in common with other intelligence officers who lived at close quarters with their adversaries, I had from time to time placed myself intellectually in the shoes of those on one side of the Curtain who took the short walk to the other; and that rationally and imaginatively I had understood the magnetic pull of such a step, and empathized with it.”

Mr. le Carré is happy at home, after an early adulthood he describes, with exquisite understatement, as “untidy.” (His books are full of betrayed wives and cuckolded husbands.) He has four sons, three with his first wife, Alison Sharp, and one — the writer Nick Harkaway, the author of “The Gone-Away World” — with his second wife, Jane. Altogether, they run a successful extended family, which includes 12 grandchildren.

A product of Sherborne boarding school and Oxford, Mr. le Carré is of the establishment but also outside of it. Years ago, Margaret Thatcher’s government offered to make him a Commander of the British Empire (in the hierarchy of awards, it is a step down from a knighthood); he turned it down.

“I absolutely don’t approve of artists getting medals from the state — they should stay outside the city walls,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to be Sir David.” He laughed. “Lord David, King David. I don’t want any of those things. I find it absolutely fatuous.”

The tea long gone, he agreed to lead a short touristic excursion down the street to Hampstead Heath. He takes daily long walks in this wildest of London parks. He stopped at a row of trees just inside one of the entrances. Here, in the crook of a branch, is the very spot from which George Smiley extracts the crumpled packet of Gauloises, a message from his old agent Vladimir, in “Smiley’s People.”

Seeing it was a thrill, a bit of fictional history come to life, and Mr. le Carré said he was delighted to be of service. He doesn’t mind, he said, being introduced even now as the author of the 45-year-old “Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” which Graham Greene once said was “the best spy story I have ever read.”

“For me, Kingsley Amis is still the man who wrote ‘Lucky Jim,’ ” he said. “ If you write one book that, for whatever reason, becomes iconic, it’s an extraordinary blessing.”

But his famous spy, who was never very healthy anyway, would now be more than 100 years old, Mr. le Carré said. “He belonged to his time, and his time is over.”

Not Mr. le Carré’s, though. He has no plans yet for a new novel, but there is the memoir, perhaps, and a lifetime of startling experiences.

These include surreal encounters with world leaders who assumed, incorrectly, that whatever they told Mr. le Carré would be passed directly along to British Intelligence. Once he had dinner with Yevgeny Primakov, a former first deputy chairman of the K.G.B. and onetime Russian foreign minister. “He was an obsessive fan,” Mr. le Carré said. “But who does he identify with? George Smiley.”

But sustained self-revelation presents a complicated prospect for Mr. le Carré, who has worked so hard to control the narrative of his own life, holding back even as he carefully metes out selective truths.

As he thinks about an autobiography, he said, “I’m already constructing the lies I’m going to tell.”