The Secret Life of John le Carre

By: Adam Sisman

Narrated by: Sean Barrett

The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive.

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden.

Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy—cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work.

In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed.

The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”

©2023 Adam Sisman (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

A perfect spite

A very entertaining, disconcerting infodump. Early in the work, the author quotes The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, and that makes too much sense. Malcolm’s book is better realized, but this one too has comic pacing and winks to what its audience wants out of seriocomic materiel. Narrator makes it all sound almost sexy - but not quite. (Not his fault, it’s some pretty weird stuff!)

Women wielded as weapons

By Sisman, not by Le Carre. This could have been sly or sexy or insightful. It certainly should have been more empathic toward the women in the relationships Cornwall (Le Carre) wanted not to be made public while he and his wife were alive. But it isn’t. Nor is it anymore than superficial in its discussion of how each of those relationships contributed to Le Carre’s fictional creations. Mostly it is a flat and peevish presentation of material Sisman had to leave out of his 2015 (interesting and enjoyable) biography of Le Carre, with much too much attention on Sisman’s dealings with and anger at Le Carre and too little attention to the stories of the women themselves. He’s certainly entitled to his judgments of how Cornwell lived his life, but his own lack of empathy for the women whose stories he reports made me feel that it was pretty cheap judgment and tawdry in and of itself.