The Elusive John le Carré

Black costume, pink coat, thick beige stockings. That is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the center of the road outdoors my window, her head bent ahead beneath its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her purse like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of somebody whose mates are all lifeless.I noticed her first outdoors Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. After which once more in Spianada Sq., among the many scootering kids. I lean out the window to observe her disappear across the nook. Possibly there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small metropolis, on a small island in Greece. From my resort room I can see the inexperienced fringe of the cricket pitch the place, in John le Carré’s A Excellent Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in gradual, limping circles.Discover the September 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this situation and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreI assume A Excellent Spy is an almost excellent e book. Only some of its greater than 600 pages are literally about Corfu. In the event you needed to jot down about le Carré and journey, you might go virtually anyplace: Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the listing lengthy earlier than Corfu. However as Axel would let you know, in case you’re looking for somebody who doesn’t wish to be discovered, you don’t go to the plain locations. You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the prepare ticket to Paris as a result of they’re false leads. You look the place the path is colder.Learn: An harmless overseas in Mark Twain’s ParisMagnus is an MI6 agent who has betrayed England by spying for the Czechs, however now the People are onto him. In a frenzy of denial, he drags his spouse, Mary, and son, Tom, on a frantic Greek vacation: Lesbos, Athens, Hydra, Spetses. The Pyms change “boats and islands like pushed souls, although solely Magnus is aware of the curse, solely Magnus is aware of who’s pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others.”Corfu is the place their journey begins. For hundreds of years the island was a playground for spies, a spot torn between nice powers, the place minor officers might go to make a reputation for themselves or jaded expats might attempt to trend new lives. However in case you’re attempting to flee the previous, it’s the improper place to go.Over the span of a era, starting on the flip of the Nineteenth century, Corfu tumbled by way of the arms of 4 nice powers. Stroll into town’s Outdated Fortress and also you’ll meet a winged lion of Venice, whose face was hammered off by the Napoleonic French. On the bottom is a paving stone the place a Russian soldier carved his identify. Prince Philip was baptized right here, within the fortress’s Church of St. George. Practically 2,000 Jews have been held right here, earlier than deportation to Birkenau. Throughout the water: Albania. My tour information, Andreas Grammenos, tells me a couple of defector who swam the channel to flee the Communist dictatorship. Andreas’s father served in Corfu’s Coast Guard, and nonetheless has the pool float the person used to get throughout. The fortress’s clock tower stored time till 2003, when the final technician who knew methods to repair it retired.The clock tower of the Outdated Fortress in Corfu (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)It was the British who introduced cricket right here, Magnus tells Tom. “Magnus knew these issues. Or pretended to.” Their vacation is all late lunches, amorous siestas, tennis classes for Tom, and, for stressed Magnus, lengthy night walks. Till, in the future, Axel tracks him down on the cricket pitch to warn him. “It’s over,” he says. “Include me.” He means disappear, defect. The double agent has to select a facet, or at the very least admit that the sport is over.Magnus refuses to listen to it. He spins lies, hauling his household to at least one island after one other: “Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, outdated chap. However this place is simply too damned idyllic.” Tom is aware of one thing, although. He has seen this “thriller man at cricket,” he tells his mom—a “clever, stringy man with a tragic moustache like a magican’s.” They went “spherical and spherical the bottom along with the skinny man going slowly like an invalid.” He was type to Magnus. He was “like a father.”John le Carré’s actual identify was David Cornwell, and his father, Ronnie, was a con man and a prison. In 1977, David took his household—his first spouse, Ann, and their three boys—to Corfu on trip. Adam Sisman tells the story in John le Carré: The Biography:Sitting outdoors at an open-air seashore restaurant David overheard a well-recognized voice speaking at a close-by desk.“Reg?” he requested tentatively.“What if I’m?”“It’s David.”The suspicious glare melted. “Ronnie’s boy!”Reg was one in every of Ronnie’s loyal hangers-on, a solid of courtiers that included harmless marks and devoted henchmen and a rotating roster of substitute moms for younger le Carré. Reg informed le Carré that he and others had taken the rap for a few of Ronnie’s crimes, and served time in jail for them. “We was all bent, son,” Reg mentioned. “However your dad was very, very bent.”That scene from Corfu turns up in A Excellent Spy, although Reg is changed by a personality named Syd Lemon, who drops these strains again in England. Syd is talking with Magnus’s MI6 boss, who’s looking for him earlier than the Czechs, or Magnus’s personal despair, catch as much as him. Within the novel, Magnus’s father is named Rick. “I did time” for Rick, Syd says. “Plenty of us did.” Rick “was bent, you see. We was all bent.” However Rick “was very bent certainly.”Le Carré tried, and felt he failed, for 25 years to jot down about his father, earlier than he discovered, with A Excellent Spy, that he might lay the story of life with Ronnie over the armature of an espionage thriller. The e book begins with Magnus on the run, heading for the hiding place of his personal creativeness, a visitor room by the ocean. The story slips between previous and current whereas the narration slips from first particular person to 3rd and again once more, typically from sentence to condemn, which is solely pure, as a result of we’re not the folks we was once. Magnus’s childhood—the lacking mom; the boarding faculties; the weepy, groping hugs from Rick—is each bit as harrowing as being hunted by the East and West without delay.Le Carré wrote 26 novels earlier than he died, in 2020. He traveled to analysis lots of them. In every single place he went, he dreaded assembly victims of his father’s schemes. Ronnie confirmed up in Cairo and Beirut—attempting, perhaps, to get into the gun-running enterprise—then in Singapore, the place he was arrested; then in Hong Kong, the place he was arrested once more. Now a letter got here: Ronnie was in Delhi, claiming that he’d been appointed a maharaja’s right-hand man and asking his son for £1,000.The seductive energy of this man! It is a man who wooed his personal prosecutor. After a conviction for fraud, Ronnie wrote admiring letters from jail to the person who had argued towards his attraction. Upon his launch, Sisman writes, the prosecutor got here to stick with Ronnie, who launched him to “obliging younger girls.” A long time later, in Hong Kong, the place le Carré went to analysis the novel that grew to become The Honourable Schoolboy, he bumped into the policeman who had overseen Ronnie’s imprisonment there: “Mr. Cornwell, sir, your father is likely one of the most interesting males I’ve ever met,” he informed le Carré. “After I get again to London, he’s going to set me up in enterprise.” You couldn’t contact him with out being corrupted by him.When Ronnie died, le Carré might have thought himself liberated. The sensation lasted for about 5 minutes. At the start of A Excellent Spy, the cellphone rings, asserting the loss of life of Magnus’s father: “I’m free,” Magnus says. However even after loss of life, Rick retains turning up. Very close to the top, A Excellent Spy is addressed to his ghost.As soon as, a girl contacted le Carré. He had no thought who she was, however she appeared to consider that they’d had intercourse on a prepare. After all, Sisman writes, it had been Ronnie, “passing himself off because the world-famous writer.” The primary particular person, the second, the third; truth, fiction, loss of life—they have been no match for Ronnie Cornwell.Sooner or later in Corfu, I catch a cricket match performed by a bunch of veterans. A person asks me one thing in Greek, then switches to English: He’s questioning if I can clarify the principles to his son. I’ve been writing in a pocket book—perhaps he thought I used to be some form of official, retaining rating, when what I’m truly writing is that I’ve by no means seen so many older gents taking their shirts off in public. They thwack the ball into the car parking zone, and I think about le Carré pretending to observe whereas dreading, all the time, the opportunity of his father showing within the crowd.A slim avenue in Corfu’s Outdated City (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)Simply as Corfu isn’t the primary place you’d search for John le Carré, I’m most likely not the primary particular person you’d count on to jot down about him. A Excellent Spy was revealed in 1986, the 12 months I used to be born. Additionally, I’m a girl. One of many complaints towards le Carré was that he couldn’t write feminine characters. They tended to be lovely and faithless, all the time operating off, one critic wrote, “with one other male, like a cat.” Anyway, I don’t care about that. I don’t actually care concerning the girls or lack of ladies within the 25 different novels, both.The character I establish with is Magnus—along with his compulsive adoption of different folks’s values, with the way in which he places on an identification solely to solid it apart, along with his harm and delusion, along with his ravenous must be beloved. In every single place he goes, Magnus compiles items of Magnus: from Ronnie’s retinue; from the flowery boys at boarding college and the Oxford socialists he spies on; from Axel; from Jack Brotherhood, his mentor at MI6. “Magnus is a superb imitator,” Axel tells Mary. “I typically assume he’s solely put collectively from bits of different folks, poor fellow.”Learn: John le Carré knew England’s secretsAt the chance of turning an island stuffed with actual folks right into a useful literary metaphor: Corfu is an efficient place to consider affect and identification, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a complete.Corfu emerged from the churn of historic and colonial historical past solely to plunge into devastating world wars—as many as one in 20 Greeks died throughout World Warfare II from violence or famine—after which right into a brutal civil warfare, after which right into a tourism increase. As we speak, a couple of quarter of its inhabitants have been born overseas. And but Andreas’s household has lived right here for eight generations. He can discover, within the archives saved within the Outdated Fortress, letters from his ancestors haggling over the worth of wine. When he was rising up, you didn’t want a ticket to enter the fortress, and he and his mates used to play there, daring each other to run by way of the tunnels, the kids’s footsteps echoing off the traditional partitions.Andreas takes me and Alice, the photographer I’m touring with, from the fortress by way of town. The homes aren’t the blue and white of the Greek flag. As an alternative (because of the Venetians) they’re sherbet-colored—cream and butter yellow, pink, apricot, and peach. The cafés on the avenue close to the cricket pitch are busy, however complete grids of empty tables stay roped off. It’s April, and one feels already the boring tread of the approaching summer season crowds. Andreas says that as late because the Nineteen Fifties, it will have been “unthinkable” for a mean villager to return right here for espresso—solely the elite have been welcome. Tourism modified that. One night time, a restaurant is taking part in “I’m too attractive for my shirt, too attractive for my shirt, so attractive it hurts.”As we speak Corfu is likely one of the most densely populated World Heritage Websites in Europe. Andreas says the native authorities is concerned in a contentious debate about air conditioners: Can they be rigged up outdoors folks’s properties, or are they a desecration of the scenic previous? It’s scorching right here in the summertime. Personally, I don’t assume vacationers ought to even be allowed to see this place in the event that they’re going to go round complaining about AC items ruining their view.Vacationers and locals agree that an important factor to do in Corfu is go to Saint Spyridon. Spyridon was a shepherd in Cyprus who grew to become a bishop, went to the Council of Nicaea, carried out miracles, and (after he died and was disinterred and embalmed) traveled by way of the mountains from Constantinople to Greece in a sack on the again of a mule.Exterior his church, folks purchase candles to mild: The larger the prayer, the larger the candle. Inside is his physique. Every morning, Spyridon’s slippered ft are revealed so that folks can kiss them, but it surely’s the afternoon now, so the road to get into the crypt isn’t too lengthy. Above his casket dangle dozens of silver thuribles, and from the silver thuribles, silver tamata—plaques engraved with the photographs of answered prayers (a child, a coronary heart)—and little silver ships, the image of Corfu. The church’s altar stands behind an iconostasis, a wall of icons and work. Andreas says this can be a frequent characteristic of Greek Orthodox church buildings as a result of his countrymen “love thriller”—as a result of they perceive the ability of the hidden, the unseen.Corfu was by no means a middle of diplomatic exercise, but it surely was a hub of knowledge, the place information have been dug up and traded just like the metals and minerals of different lands. Aggelis Zarokostas, a historian at Utrecht College who’s writing a e book about 18th- and Nineteenth-century espionage in mainland Greece and the Ionian Islands, informed me the story of an agent named for the saint. Spiridon Foresti was a British consul who stored submitting dispatches even after the French put him beneath home arrest for a 12 months. He should have dropped his reviews out his home windows; how he was in a position to collect the knowledge whereas locked inside, nobody is aware of.A lady lights candles outdoors the Holy Church of Saint Spyridon. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)British rule in Corfu lasted from 1815 to 1864. The English argued that they have been bringing regulation and order to a cutthroat land. Instantly after they arrived, a plague broke out. Officers, going door-to-door gathering details about the unwell and their contacts, dragged monks together with them to threaten folks with excommunication in the event that they didn’t comply.Lengthy after Corfu was turned over to the Greeks, traces of the English remained, as did many expats. Probably the most well-known have been the Durrells, who moved to Corfu in 1935. There’s a preferred British TV present about them: The Durrells, which begins with a broke and plucky widow ditching England to carry her 4 obstreperous kids right here. Two of these kids grew as much as be authors—Gerald, the well-known nature author, and Lawrence, the novelist.I introduced with me a replica of Lawrence’s memoir of life on the island, Prospero’s Cell. Revealed in 1945, it’s stuffed with lush writing concerning the panorama: “The olives are tacking madly from gray to silver”; the “cypresses are like drawn bows.” However he will be nasty concerning the “natives.” He describes the arms and ft of peasants as “blunt and hideous: mere spades grown upon the members by way of an extended battle with soil, ropes, and wooden.” After studying that, I really feel rather less good about the truth that my resort room is named the Durrell suite. There’s a bust of Lawrence outdoors the Outdated Fortress. Andreas says folks assume that he was a spy too.Alice and I’ve gone again to the fortress to go to the library housed within the British garrison, the place the supervisor lets us contact a Sixteenth-century version of The Iliad. As we’re leaving, some youngsters on a subject journey mark us out as English (Alice is English however, for the report, I’m American—and that is the one and solely time I’ve ever imagined that this truth might be a protection towards something). They mock us, mercilessly. To be honest, all they do is say “Whats up,” however they draw out the greeting in a approach that makes clear what a completely preposterous phrase hiya is. “Hellooo,” they hold saying, waving and laughing at us.The general public library in Corfu is situated contained in the Outdated Fortress. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)We hustle away with our heads down and proceed on to the 2 foremost websites of British reminiscence in Corfu: the British Cemetery and the property of Mon Repos.The cemetery is a raveled inexperienced dreamscape. Simply inside is an historic stone garden curler, extra sculpture now than instrument. For a short time, I pulled it, creaking, by way of the lengthy grasses. Farther in, we discover the graves. There are the traditional ones of midshipmen and infants, the graves of British troopers from each world wars, after which, from more moderen years, plaques for the expats: Barbara Anne Purpose (BORN IN OXFORD, ENGLAND—FOREVER IN CORFU), Gladys Fish (RESTING IN CORFU: A PLACE SO LOVED), and Adda Dendrinou:BORN KARACHI 1941DIED CORFU 1995TRUE CORFIOTE SHE LOVED ENGLANDThe Mon Repos property was inbuilt 1828 for the British lord excessive commissioner, and a century later, Prince Philip was born on a tabletop inside. I want to see the desk, however the shutters of the mansion are sealed tight. (Anyway, it seems the desk is lengthy gone—offered to a delivery firm for the boardroom of its London workplace.) You could find Roman retaining partitions on the grounds right here, and particles from a temple to Hera. At the back of the derelict backyard is a row of metallic arches pushed into the bottom like a large’s croquet hoops. They have been coated in wisteria as soon as, however the shade should have shifted because the bushes grew taller. The plant didn’t die although; it simply reared up and threw itself towards the solar, kudzuing over the close by treetops. I lie there, respiratory within the candy, woozy odor of untamed wisteria.On the backside of the property, Alice and I step off a jetty and swim out into the chilly, blue sea. By this level, I completely get Gladys Fish: I’m able to dwell and die right here too.Wisteria drapes over bushes within the now-derelict backyard of the Mon Repos property. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)I’m not alleged to be swimming and smelling flowers; I’m alleged to be doing John le Carré issues: strolling on cliff tops muttering to myself, checking dead-letter drops, sweet-talking my brokers within the subject. I hold on the lookout for males in darkish raincoats, but it surely doesn’t rain and my sole candidate for both surveillance or countersurveillance stays my girl with the purse.Le Carré was solely ever a minor spy, and he stop the service the minute he might afford to. After the publication of The Spy Who Got here In From the Chilly, in 1963, his household lived overseas to decrease their tax invoice. A few of that point was spent in Greece, on Crete. Le Carré was depressing there. He wrote lengthy letters to the spouse of a colleague and flew forwards and backwards to Paris, London, and New York, the place he was out of the blue well-known. When he was on Crete, his spouse, Ann, nagged him about visiting the island’s historic websites. “I hate ruins,” he wrote to a good friend. He took so many walks and made so many long-distance cellphone calls that, Sisman writes, “a neighborhood official accused him of spying for the Turks and requested for a bribe as the worth of his silence.”Learn: The double lifetime of John le CarréAt one level, a Czech author, or somebody posing as a Czech author, got here to Crete and stored asking him to satisfy. Le Carré was nervous sufficient to contact the top of the Athens station to report that Czech intelligence was attempting to recruit him. In an interview with Sisman, I requested if he actually believed this. His biography isn’t a examine of simply an interesting man, however an interesting liar, one who—very very like his father—spun fictions that he then struggled to tell apart from the reality. However a Czech method, Sisman informed me, appeared believable.Le Carré mentioned that he was drawn to spying as a result of he needed to serve his nation—and to do penance for Ronnie’s crimes. However he additionally discovered that secrecy might be a “place of escape,” a approach of feeling “superior to life moderately than partaking in it.” He “relished the notion of showing to be somebody boring, whereas on a regular basis I used to be somebody terribly thrilling.”After spying, he discovered different methods to flee. One was writing; one other was journey. When he went overseas to analysis a brand new novel, he would go in character, pretending to be whomever he was writing about. Possibly he bought the thought from a coaching train for MI6, which concerned posing as a German vacationer in Brighton; he stored the accent up even whereas being interrogated by native police.A constructing present process renovations in Outdated City (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)I had the concept that, whereas penning this story, I might go round pretending to be different folks. I’m hopeless at accents, however I might provide you with backstories: Possibly I used to be heading to a vacation spot bachelorette get together, or was on a soul-searching journey earlier than pursuing IVF. My identify is likely to be Olivia, or Stef, or Gladys Fish. However getting strangers to ask me private questions is more durable than I anticipated, particularly as a result of I principally wish to speak with Alice, and after two days collectively, I’ve already informed her all the pieces that has ever occurred to me. Magnus by no means has that downside. “Why don’t you simply inform me the reality?” Mary calls for. “The suggestion amused him.”It was not till I learn Sisman’s second e book on the writer, The Secret Lifetime of John le Carré, which he revealed solely after le Carré’s loss of life, that I grasped how a lot of le Carré’s writing substitutes one place for an additional, one girl for an additional. In 1983, le Carré went again to Greece, this time to Lesbos. By then he’d divorced Ann and married his second spouse, Jane, however he wasn’t touring along with her. He had a brand new mistress—Sue Dawson, half his age. Within the mornings, Sisman writes, she would “lean away from bed to see by way of the gaps between the outdated floorboards to see him working within the room under.” The e book he was writing on the time was, in fact, A Excellent Spy, wherein Magnus’s spouse, Mary, does the identical factor, wanting by way of the “gaps between the planks” to see Magnus showering within the room downstairs.Le Carré informed Dawson that she was his muse. He’d met her by way of her job: producing abridged books for cassette tapes. Mary’s job is to rebind outdated books for MI6 with secret messages hidden inside. The one e book Magnus by no means lets her restore is his battered outdated copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, which purports to be the autobiography of an adventurer through the Thirty Years’ Warfare and is taken into account Germany’s first literary masterpiece. Magnus received’t let Mary contact Simplicissimus as a result of it’s the key codebook he makes use of to speak with Axel. When le Carré bought house from Lesbos, his spouse typed up the pages he’d written.“With out a lot effort,” Sisman writes, “I used to be in a position to establish eleven girls with whom he had affairs,” and “there have been a lot extra apart from.” Sisman means that dishonest grew to become a substitute for espionage for le Carré, an “ersatz type of spying”—one other solution to dwell a double life.Fish within the sea off Mon Repos (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)It’s 10 days till Good Friday, and in accordance with Lawrence Durrell, there’s a fable right here concerning the 10 days resulting in Good Friday: Goat-legged creatures are sawing by way of the trunk of the tree that holds up the world. Yearly, they’ve virtually minimize by way of it after they hear the shout of “Christ has arisen!” and it makes them drop their saws to fly “in a chattering throng into the actual world—if I’ll name our world that.”Le Carré took inland walks, so Alice and I am going inland too. In just a little city referred to as Nymfes, we see a waterfall: a glittering curtain down black rock, splitting into fast rivers that appear to uncannily decelerate the longer you stare at them. It’s not arduous to think about nymphs residing in that glowing grove; it’s arduous to think about them not residing there. I’ve by no means needed to drink one thing so badly.Subsequent we head to the mountain village the place we’re staying the night time. We Google the instructions and begin driving, after which say “This may’t be proper” 7,000 occasions. At first the street is a country monitor by way of olive groves. If we’re going the improper approach, we don’t thoughts an excessive amount of; any second now, it’s certain to loop us again onto a street. Nope. As an alternative we climb increased and better, to scenic overlook after scenic overlook, every one in every of which is, to me, a rocky hellscape.We drive over boulders, the automobile juddering back and forth, the wheels spinning in unfastened stones. I actually hope these ominous scraping sounds are simply branches gouging the rental automobile’s paint job and never jagged rocks tearing up the undercarriage. There are puddles too, deep-brown puddles of unknown fathoms wherein the wheels will slip and the engine flood. I attempt to hold to the shallow edge whereas not, ideally, driving us straight off the cliff. Every flip is so tight that it seems to be a lifeless finish. I crawl to a halt, crane my neck, sigh, and hold driving round a switchback so excessive, I really feel like I’m driving again onto myself.Ought to we now have rotated? A thousand occasions, sure. It’s clear that nobody within the historical past of the world has ever pushed up this path. The one clarification is that we angered the nymphs they usually’re main us to our deaths and we’re simply fully going together with it. Alice retains getting me to cease in order that she will take pictures of how superb all the pieces is, whereas I hold checking the tires for puncture wounds. At one level, I attempt to Google Are nymphs harmful, however one thing on the dangers of relationship a nymphomaniac comes up, after which my cellphone loses service once more.“What number of kilometers left?” I ask Alice many, many occasions.“5 level six,” she says. Numerous white-knuckle hours later: “5.4.”Ultimately, we arrive within the village of Outdated Perithia. If solely Magnus had come this fashion, I hold pondering, Axel by no means would have discovered him.Corfu’s wealth was once concentrated inland, due to the oaks and olive groves, and since it was safer from pirates there. In line with the knowledge sheet I discover in my room that night time, in case you owned land close to the water, you’d give it to your daughter, not your son. Outdated Perithia is a lovely ghost city. It dates to 1357, and at occasions, as many as 1,200 folks would have lived right here. Now there are only a few tavernas, this mattress and breakfast, meadows of blossoming wildflowers, and the ruins. The city was deserted due to the vacationers, who sucked all the wealth and staff from the inside towards the coasts. However now so many vacationers collect on the coasts that some vacationers, desirous to get away from all the opposite vacationers, come out right here. They’re drawn by the promise that they’ll discover one thing more true and extra genuine right here. To paraphrase Durrell: the actual Corfu, if I’ll name it that.Checking in, we ask the proprietor concerning the path we drove in on. “Have been we … supposed to try this?”She appears to be like at us blankly. “You got here from the place?”“Again there, by way of the farm, up the mountain.”We clarify concerning the waterfall. She is aware of concerning the waterfall. She doesn’t learn about any path.She factors to the car parking zone. On the opposite facet of it lies the bizarre, non-enchanted asphalt street.A view of Corfu’s Outdated City at nightfall (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)Early in his profession, John le Carré tried to jot down a literary novel that had nothing to do with spying: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It was terrible. He needed to be seen as a significant author, and resented the suggestion that he ought to follow what he was good at. He resented, too, the belief that when the Chilly Warfare ended, he’d don’t have anything left to jot down about. Within the introduction to the 1993 version of The Little Drummer Lady, he complained about individuals who believed his “rice-bowl was damaged.” How might they not respect the truth that, “of my fourteen novels so far, 5 have had nothing no matter to do with the Chilly Warfare”?The extent of defensiveness is just a little pathetic, just a little endearing. As one critic put it, he had “already overwhelmed the style entice”—not by leaving style behind, “however by discovering sudden room inside, as in A Excellent Spy.” When Magnus goes to Greece, he isn’t simply attempting to get away from the Czechs and the English whereas having fun with a pleasant trip along with his household; he’s additionally attempting to jot down a literary novel, one that may comprise and transcend his previous and reconcile the fragments of his many selves. Magnus fails to jot down that nice work, the strains deteriorating into “ponderous aphorisms about betrayal”: “betrayal as love,” “betrayal as escape,” “betrayal as journey.” However le Carré succeeded. Nobody studying A Excellent Spy for the primary time right now goes to marvel if it’s a literary novel. What else might it probably be?The factor I really like most concerning the e book is the way it makes use of time to show self-pity into one thing purer. A author, Magnus thinks, is sort of a king, wanting “down with love upon his topic, even when the topic is himself.” Later he repeats the thought: If solely he might write, he’d be capable to “look with favour on this little one that was myself.” Possibly we must always all be speaking about our childhoods within the third particular person.Le Carré’s mom walked out when he and his older brother have been sleeping upstairs. They have been 5 and seven. “One simply couldn’t dwell prefer it,” she later mentioned, as if that have been an excuse. When he met her once more as an grownup, she knowledgeable him that Ronnie had contaminated her with syphilis when she was pregnant, and that he had been born with pus dripping out of his eyes. Ronnie abused him—damage him in each approach you might damage a baby—however Ronnie was the one dad or mum he had.I’m sitting in Spianada Sq. after I see the outdated girl once more. I’ve been watching kids play soccer, and fascinated by how all the time, all over the place on the planet, the littlest boy is grabbing the ball along with his arms to regular it earlier than he kicks. She’s sporting the identical pink coat and clutching her bag, heading within the route of the Outdated Fortress.“Nothing goes away in life,” Magnus says in Athens, between one island and one other. He’s been gone all night time and many of the day, and Mary calls for to know why. He’s crying; he kisses her hand and he or she feels the tears. He makes up a narrative about having to speak down an outdated Czech agent who was threatening to show him. It’s a lie. It’s one model of the reality.Journey NotesSwimming off Mon ReposMaybe you’ve been to paradise earlier than and might yawn at crystal-clear waters, however I’ve swum solely off America’s East Coast, the place the ocean is usually the colour of robust tea, which is a pleasant approach of claiming the colour of filth. Usually I’d be appalled if my leg touched slimy fish, however when you possibly can see them, it’s completely totally different. I like the fragile fish, fast and vivid as sunbeams. Floating within the water, you’re feeling outdoors of time, as if this might be any century. Hera’s worshippers is likely to be carting their stones over the hilltop, or British troopers might be galloping by—a “flash of purple searching coats by way of the olive-groves,” as Lawrence Durrell describes their hint on the panorama. However I can’t keep within the water lengthy. My arms are ice, and my chest is scorching. “It’s your coronary heart,” Alice says. A extra organized traveler would have introduced a towel, however mendacity dripping on the sun-warmed rock is best.Analipsi 7, Kerkyra 491 00, GreeceLunch at PergolaThis restaurant is in Corfu’s Jewish quarter. The world was closely bombed by the Nazis, and you may nonetheless see the gaps the place buildings have been destroyed. It makes you consider how stuffed with historical past an empty area will be. Some ruins nonetheless stand, flowers rising by way of the blasted window frames. On the restaurant, we sit outdoors and order bread and salad and large beans (that’s what they’re referred to as: large beans). A patchwork array of stray cats sit on their haunches, watching each chunk we eat.Ag. Sofias 15, Kerkyra 491 00, GreeceKissing Saint Spyridon’s casketThe casket is small, although it holds one other, smaller casket inside it. The inside one has a detachable backside for slipper entry, as a result of every morning, worshippers come to kiss the saint’s ft. About every year, the slippers are changed with new ones. The thought is that he wears them out by strolling round at night time performing miracles—or perhaps it’s all of the kissing. After I’m there, we are able to’t get on the saint’s ft, so the ladies round me press their lips to the casket as an alternative. There’s a faint odor, and when it’s my flip to bend down, I understand, to my disgrace, that as an alternative of kissing the casket, I’m sniffing it. However the odor isn’t coming from the saint. It’s coming from us: the crowding folks, the odor not of loss of life however of life. Exterior the crypt, a priest is blessing a child in a blue onesie. Whereas the pious wait in line for the saint, one other child waits in line for the priest.Agiou Spiridonos 32, Kerkyra 491 00, GreeceTreatsIf you go to Corfu, I like to recommend consuming a lot of issues—salty and candy issues, however particularly candy issues—enfolded in pastry. Right here’s a enjoyable phrase: galaktoboureko. It’s custard beneath phyllo dough, with candy syrup poured on prime, and we now have the most effective model at Periklis Alexis. The again of the bakery is embellished, inexplicably, with framed photographs of fighter jets from someday up to now century, lethal silver in blue skies. I’ve a sense that le Carré would have appreciated that—some menace to chop the sweetness.Agiou Vasileiou 12, Kerkyra 491 00, GreeceThe Service provider’s Home in Outdated PerithiaHere you possibly can sleep in a comfy suite realizing that you just’re snuggled in a valley of spring wildflowers and ghosts. A printout in my room says that after Outdated Perithia was abandoned, “nature determined to reclaim the land, and in doing so she enveloped the village.” I like this half: The creeping roots of orchids, asparagus, oregano, and wild mint “both protected many elderly buildings and church buildings, or sped up their ruination.” The village is deserted apart from the inn and a handful of taverns for day-trippers. We’re there on the very first day of the season, so I believe we get particular remedy, however the meals is scrumptious and the proprietor provides us large slices of walnut cake without cost. We linger till he has to ask us to depart, as a result of his spouse is late for bodily remedy, and the appointment might be a great distance from Outdated Perithia.Outdated Perithia, Kerkyra 49081, GreeceKanoni BeachIn Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell writes about “maybe the loveliest seashore on the planet. Its identify is Myrtiotissa.” After all we go there. Nudist Solely is spelled out in white pebbles on the prime of the trail. On the backside is a tangled heap of discarded seashore umbrellas, the metallic rusting, the sunshades in tatters. Accustomed by then to the baseline magnificence obtainable anyplace you look, we resolve the view is simply okay. “I’ve seen higher seashores in England,” Alice says. However after just a few days of looking out, we discover what is definitely the loveliest seashore on the planet, or at the very least the loveliest seashore on one April day in Corfu. It’s within the northeast, under a inexperienced spit of land lifted excessive over the ocean. In reality, there’s an ideal seashore on each facet of the outcrop, however my favourite is that this one, Kanoni. It was too chilly to swim, or I’d nonetheless be there, diving off the rocks. Sometime I wish to return and swim across the outcrop, stopping off at both sides. Possibly I beloved it a lot as a result of even whereas I used to be there, I used to be dreaming of returning.Plous Books & CoffeeCorfu has loads of vacationer traps, lengthy lanes lined with generic retailers promoting honey, physique lotion constructed from donkey milk and olive oil, evil-deflecting blue-glass eyes, and—for some purpose—tote baggage with Frida Kahlo’s face on them, as in the event that they ordered all of their merchandise from the identical conglomerate’s catalog. However this bookstore is quirky and candy, with shabby damask chairs in a dimly lit again room the place you possibly can sit and drink espresso and skim. I get a replica of The Useless, by James Joyce, in Greek. Notably: I can’t discover any books by John le Carré.Nikiforou Theotoki 91, Kerkyra 491 00, GreeceThis article seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “Chasing le Carré in Corfu.” If you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. 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