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I wasn't lying when I said I cried when I read about le Carre yesterday. His books mean so much to me that it's really hard to sum up. I *still* remember the punch in the gut I felt when I read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (which was also my first ever gift to @arunmsukumar)
A lot of it goes back to my time at Oxford. I studied at St. Antony's, which is now infamously known as the University's spy college. I saw now, because that moniker used to belong to Lincoln, le Carre's college, in no small part because le Carre studied there.
Antony's was founded in the shadow of the Cold War, & its hard to extricate the college from that era. I remember reading a brilliant essay by Mark Mazower about the field of modern German history only to realize it was also a history of my old college. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/richard-evans-historian-not-baffled-by-nazis/?lp_txn_id=1001936
With figures like Sirs Richard Evans (the greatest historian of modern Germany), William Deakin (Churchill's private secretary), and others making the new college their hub "it became possible to take Germany’s recent past seriously and to study it in depth"
le Carre's jabs at Antony's is a point of amusement amongst Antonian le Carre fans. Roddy Martindale in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy says Antony's is “redbrick.” Turner in A Small Town in Germany is ‘a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people’
Antony's does take all kinds of people, which is how I ended up there studying the Middle East in the shadow of 9/11, and why it will always be my intellectual home. I was comfortable there in a way I could never be at the snobbish Oxford colleges like Christ Church or Merton.
I bring this up is because reading le Carre for me wasn't just about understanding politics or ideology and how they break down. Deep down they were also a harsh and critical commentary on the social mores and classism of British society. None of le Carre's heroes are "gentlemen"
That was really his greatness - he could marry big themes and events to deeply searing sociological and human observations in a way that makes his novels timeless. What a writer.
A final note, the last time I visited Oxford, some three years ago, I popped into an Oxfam and found (as you would only in Oxford perhaps) a first edition of Tinker Tailor nonchalantly placed on the shelves. I bought it, of course.
What made it even more special was where I bought it - on Turl Street, right across from the gates of Lincoln College.
