Errol Morris’s interview with the great English novelist John le Carré (born David Cornwell), deferential and unthreatening as it is, provides another example of a great truth in documentaries that the simple spectacle of clever people talking on camera is as gripping as any thriller. This one-on-one set piece in the classic Morris style (though co-produced by the author’s sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell) was completed just before the author’s death in 2020.
Morris asks le Carré cordial questions about the great themes of betrayal and duplicity in his spy fiction and how they were inspired by his early life. Le Carré answers them with mesmeric fluency and charm, like a brilliant Oxbridge don who has brought a guest from the media to a special high table feast and treats his questions as an opportunity to hold forth. The answers are interspersed with clips from TV and movie adaptations of his work, old archive interviews and some dramatisations commissioned especially for this film.
The title is essentially black comic and bleak, related to the the author’s horribly disreputable father: the bankrupt conman and jailbird Ronnie Cornwell, immortalised in his 1986 novel, A Perfect Spy. Ronnie involved his teenage son David in his crummy, seedy lies, but would indirectly and subconsciously inspire him to find a profession in which shifty untruths could be transformed and redeemed as a good and even patriotic thing – spying. And then there was writing novels about spying: another level of non-truth.
Ronnie took young David with him on business trips to the south of France where a certain hotel offered, bizarrely, a pigeon shooting platform which looked out over the Mediterranean. Pigeons were bred on the hotel roof and then shoved through a special tunnel at the end of which they flew out, to be shot at by Ronnie and his grinning associates. Are we all in the pigeon tunnel of life?
After a short while as an Eton schoolmaster, le Carré served some time in the intelligence services and as an agent in east Germany, where he witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall (although how exactly he was recruited is a question on which Morris does not press le Carré – perhaps his Oxford tutor, the ecclesiastical historian Vivian Green, always a kindly presence in his life, had something to do with it).
He found glorious bestselling success, and his experiences in the service, along with his father’s influence, somehow combined to create a combustible creative force. Fiction also gave him a way, as he explains here, of expressing his complicated feelings about informing on a communist acquaintance of his at Oxford called Stanley Mitchell: although he never seems the smallest bit agonised about that. It is Ronnie who looms over him, the Ronnie of his childhood always ducking and diving, and the Ronnie of his adulthood always wheedling and whining for money and needing to be bailed out of prison.
Le Carré had clearly taken a personal and career decision long ago to talk personally about his father – but no one else. He certainly has no intention of talking about Suleika Dawson, who last year published The Secret Heart, a luridly written memoir of their extramarital liaisons. Morris would have been within his rights to push le Carré a little bit harder on that: after all, sexual and marital betrayal features in his fiction, in parallel to the larger betrayals. It would have been a legitimate question.
I was also sorry that Morris couldn’t ask him about the snobbery that he faced even at the very end – some critics and literary editors couldn’t quite bring themselves to call him a “novelist”; it always had to be “spy novelist”. Perhaps le Carré was unconcerned because his prestige put him above these things: he was a genre of his own. Perhaps there is nothing very new in this film, but it’s a very civilised experience.
The Pigeon Tunnel screened at the Toronto film festival and is on Apple TV+ from 20 October.
