Fetch The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Executed By John Le Carré Accessible In Publication

though I still have five more books to go in Le Carres back catalogue, I decided to read the memoir, And yes there are spoilers in it, But that is beside the point,

I was able to read about what parts of his life inspired his stories, So while I was reading the memoir I was like this part inspired this and this part inspired that, And it gave me a greater insight to Le Carres “shadowy” past,

Now I am anticipating the rest of his novels even more, From BBC RadioBook of the Week:
John le Carre with five recollections from his writing life, abridged by Katrin Williams:

/: One time at a party Denis Healey says: 'You're a communist spy, that what you are'.
Plus a memorable lunch with Alec Guinness to discuss his character George Smiley,

/: There was Yvette Pierpaoli, a business woman who once worked out of Phnom Penn, We discover how her character and actions went towards creating Tessa in the novel The Constant Gardener,

/: At sixteen he was sent by his father Ronnie to Paris, to meet with Count Mario da Bernaschina and his glamorous wife, What an adventure! Memories of this encounter went towards the creation of novels such as The Night Manager and The Tailor Of Panama,

/: During the filming of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, its star Richard Burton requests that the author be on set with him.
Then Elizabeth Taylor turns up too, .

/: Asked to visit the film director Karel Reisz at home in London's Belsize Park, he meets a young actor called Vladimir, But the meeting has nothing to do with films or acting nothing at all, .

Read by the author

Producer Duncan Minshull,

sitelink bbc. co. uk/programmes/btzrwc The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life was a delightful, entertaining and very personal memoir written by one of my favorite spy novelists, David Cornwell, best known by his pen name of John le Carre.
As you settle in to immerse yourself and listen to one of our greatest raconteurs, it becomes clear that the life of David Cornwell as a British spy for Britain's MIand MIwas just as exciting as the spies in the novels written by le Carre.
It is also very interesting to see how his mystery novels mirror much of his life experiences and the many characters are based at least in part on people in his life.
Writing his memoir in his eighties, it has been suggested that there is the dilemma of what is true and what is fabricated, However le Carre responds to that query in his memoir with this lovely quote:

"To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned, Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter, To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing, Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance, "

"Spying and novel writing are made for each other, Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and many routes to betrayal,

"Grahame Greene tells us that childhood is the credit balance of the writer, By that measure at least, I was born a millionaire, "

ADDENDUM December,
I was saddened to learn of the death of one of my favorite authors, John Le Carre.
May he rest in peace, I will continue to work my way through his magnificent body of work but he will be missed, sitelinkThe Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Lifeby sitelinkJohn le Carré is superb, and the perfect accompaniment to sitelinkJohn le Carré: The Biography by sitelinkAdam Sisman.
Unlike the biography, this is just a succession of concise and fascinating anecdotes from his life, These cover research trips for novels and encounters with the great and the good,

Towards the end of the book sitelinkJohn le Carré writes about Ronnie, his appalling father who blighted and defined his life, Ronnie is completely selfcentred and a consumate conman, Readers of the biography, or sitelinkA Perfect Spy, will already know just how astounding his antics were, It's incredible that sitelinkJohn le Carré was able to move out of his shadow,

If you enjoy sitelinkJohn le Carré's novels, or you are just interested in the postWar era, or you like interesting anecdotes, then this is a

book to prioritise

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'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit.
First comes the imagining, then the search for reality, Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now, '

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from wartorn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of theIsraeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times.
In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.
Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.
Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.


'No other writer has charted pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers the public and secret histories of his times' Guardian

'John le Carré is as recognisable a writer as Dickens or Austen' Financial Times

'When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré.
. . they were a journey into the wider world, . . These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind' Aung San Suu Kyi I was given this book together with Le Carre's latest novel, the longawaited sequel to sitelinkThe Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
I have been a fan of Le Carre's writing for many years, and the said sequel delivered again, But I am in two minds about the author's autobiographical work as I feared before opening it, familiarity can engender disappointment, if not contempt, The book certainly explains the genesis of many of his characters, incidents, and dilemmas but that much was evident anyway, Perhaps what disappointed me most was his account of his visit to the town of Bukava in the DRC, I have worked there three times, and know the region very well, Le Carre travelled there in the company of UN dignitaries, and seems not to have ventured outside the privileged bubble in which such people exist.
Did he interact with any of the mere mortals who live there, and whose lives and deaths have filled a tragic chapter of world history over the lastyears, at least If he had, he might have discovered that the Belgian expat he describes provided a truck for the CIAbacked Katanga rebellion in thes.
At least that is what I was told by a local in the town, I couldn't help the impression that, despite his troubled background or perhaps because of it the author is a snob, In short, for me at least, this book shattered the illusion that the author has so skilfully crafted over the last half century, since the days when he was indeed an authority on his subject matter.
"Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit, First comes the imagining, then the search for reality, Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now, "

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from wartorn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of theIsraeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times.
In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.


Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth, visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, celebrating New Year's Evewith Yasser Arafat and his high command, interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, meeting with two former heads of the KGB, watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.


Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.
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