While there is plenty of tabloid-worthy material between its covers, the book is nonetheless complex and consequential — a portrait of lifelong duplicity and betrayal as carried out by a novelist whose work so often focused on those themes. By the end, we’re convinced that one reason le Carré wrote with such insight on these dark arts is because he was such an able and enthusiastic practitioner of them ... The book is also a fascinating examination of the biographer’s art ... Sisman’s new book casts le Carre’s life and writing in a fresh light, because up to now the dominant perception was that he wrote so well about deception and betrayal due to his horrible childhood.
This slim, enchanting, and exotically—in our era of lies—candid book is a kind of dividend to Sisman’s 2015 biography of the author. It contains the one aspect of the story that Sisman was forbidden from including in that book but which le Carré’s son Simon Cornwell allowed him to disclose following his father’s death, in 2020. The Secret Life of John le Carré is oddly unsalacious, though. Its contents are, for le Carré–lovers, less compelling as potential cause for condemnation than for the literary question they raise: How many of the romances were research?
A short book, yet Sisman makes the most of those few pages as a corrective to his earlier portrait. It was not just le Carré’s libido that he felt obliged to omit first time round ... We can distinguish between art and the artist, and Sisman is correct that ultimately it is the books that count, and that they will endure. He is also right when he says that John le Carré told the truth, but that David Cornwell could not.
Sisman – who is a delicate writer keen to acknowledge the ambiguity of the biographer’s role – is at pains to explore le Carré’s sexual restlessness in terms of his excruciatingly unhappy childhood and his comparative failure as a spy.
Sisman’s title is over-juiced ... Ultimately, he’s reasserting ownership of the narrative. I feel for Sisman: out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. Not the secret life of John le Carré, then, so much as the secret life of John le Carré, the 2015 biography whose blind spots – we now know – can’t be pinned on its beleaguered author.
Sisman uncovers a previously hidden and discomfiting dimension of le Carré, and remains remarkably unflinching when addressing the implications ... Future accounts of le Carré’s life will have to wrestle with the bombshells dropped here.
