Political pundit Matthew Yglesias has been reading early John le Carré.
I don’t traffic in these circles, but from wherever I sit over here in jazz land etc., it does seem that elites have appropriated far-left language as yet another way to maintain a gated community.
The article is good, but Yglesias struck a chord for another reason, namely the gambit of building an essay around A Murder of Quality. That very novel made a significant impact when I read it in high school, for the book introduced me to the idea of Town and Gown.
In the book’s case that means Oxford, where the local denizens don’t rub along well with people associated with the famous college.
My birthplace of Menomonie, Wisconsin, is not so famous as Oxford but it was still a college town. My parents moved there so my dad could teach art at UW-Stout.
It was easy to apply Le Carre’s discussion of Town and Gown in A Murder of Quality to my own life in Menomonie. Almost all my friends, my parent’s friends, and the larger social circle of my life were Gown. What a shock! I hadn’t noticed that when my contemporaries and I made cruel jokes about farmers and townies (from our lofty perches as scions of educators), we were absolutely part of an elitist social system.
After reading A Murder of Quality I stopped making those jokes.
In time I became somewhat expert in le Carré, remaining a committed fanboy at least until the end of the Cold War, when the arc of history deprived so many great spy novelists the basic framework of their fables. His early work is a valuable example of a writer slowly finding the right path. I’d need to look at them all again, but at my moment of peak immersion, I had decided that
Call for the Dead (1961) is a fine opener in the Ambler tradition.
A Murder of Quality (1962) is a swing and a miss: the author learns that writing conventional murder mysteries (the book is more or less untouched by espionage despite the presence of George Smiley) isn’t a good fit.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) in an honored classic, one of the supreme examples of the form. Le Carré has found his music.
Trivia: A Murder of Quality is notably influenced by Five Roundabouts to Heaven, a novel from Le Carré’s most important mentor, John Bingham. Le Carré repaid this debt by visibly advocating for Five Roundabouts and thus ensuring that his mentor stayed in print.
Opening night at Birdland last night was great! Here Mark Turner explains something about living in LA to Billy Hart and Ben Street:
I have enjoyed Le Carré. Maybe I won't read him again; I do have Reacher. But maybe I will.