Le Carré's Landscape

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

In this book, Tod Hoffman provides both a chronological exploration of
John le Carré’s fiction and an account of his own experiences as a
CSIS intelligence officer. He treats le Carré’s characters as people
whose actions and traits measure up—or fail to measure up—to those
of their counterparts in the real world of political intrigue. He sees a
kinship between spies and writers, a shared sense of separateness, “of
observing events without fully participating, of eavesdropping on
conversations without contributing.”

Nowhere are the boundaries between writer and spy more blurred than in
the incestuous relationship between the language and ideas expressed in
le Carré’s fiction and those associated with real-life espionage:
“it was really impossible to differentiate what [le Carré]
extrapolated from the real world to his fiction and what we [CSIS]
appropriated from his imagination to glorify our world.” As Hoffman
vividly describes the day-to-day frustrations of life at CSIS, it
becomes clear that his world needed all the glorifying it could get.