Book Review - The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre

The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The 39 Steps was the first spy story I read. Alistair MacLean’s thrillers, Ian Fleming’s suave Bond, Ken Follett – no other author can thrill like le Carre’s inimitable cryptic and breathless style of writing.
In this brilliant book his propensity of changing tenses is in full display. He narrates an event that took place in the past and suddenly the tense changes to the present continuous...

The most rigorous instruction in prose writing that I ever received came, not from any schoolteacher or university tutor, least of all from a writing school. It came from the classically educated senior officers on the top floor of MI5’s headquarters in Curzon Street, Mayfair, who seized on my reports with gleeful pedantry, heaping contempt on my dangling clauses and gratuitous adverbs, scouring the margins of my deathless prose with such comments as redundant – omit – justify – sloppy – do you really mean this? No editor I have since encountered was so exacting, or so right.

Some mysteries remain – is the beautiful Ann and the tumultuous marital life of George Smiley based on the author’s life? After all, Alison Ann Veronica Sharp was the author’s first wife’s name. The origin of his nom de plume remains a mystery.
John ‘the Square’ died a month ago – was it COVID-19 that took him or was it a “natural” death?
Like his convoluted spy stories there is nothing linear or straightforward in this auto-biographical novel. It is a collection of vignettes from his writing career, incidents of how he transformed interesting people he encountered into characters for his books, research for plot settings, droll bits about famous film makers – including interactions with Richard Burton (Alec Leamas) and Alec Guinness (George Smiley). However, except for the last chapter where he talks about his errant father (the inspiration for Magnus Pym’s father - A Perfect Spy), there is nothing much about his personal life. Although he does reveal the rather morbid provenance of the enigmatic title of the book.
I found it interesting that a vowel separates the author's name and place of residence - Cornwell and Cornwall - material for conspiracy theorists?

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