NZFOI: John Le Carre was one of the most successful spy novelists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He arguably created the genre of the spy as the anti-hero in stark contrast to the glamorous spies created by Ian Fleming. In this interview, Le Carre reveals himself to be a staunch supporter of Israel.
In a rare interview 22 years ago, the peerless thriller writer talked about Israel and Jews; Smiley could have been Jewish, he said of his most famous character. ‘Perhaps he was’
John le Carre, the master spy novelist who died Sunday aged 89, had a long fascination and sympathy for the Jewish people and a deep admiration for Israel.
Jewish characters were interwoven in his many novels, and his research into the 1983 novel “The Little Drummer Girl” gave him his first real exposure to Israel with a visit that “rocked” him, he said in a rare 1998 interview with Douglas Davis of the Jewish World Review.
“Israel,” he told Davis, “rocked me to my boots. I had arrived expecting whatever European sentimentalists expect — a re-creation of the better quarters of Hampstead [in London]. Or old Danzig, or Vienna or Berlin. The strains of Mendelssohn issuing from open windows of a summer’s evening. Happy kids in seamen’s hats clattering to school with violin cases in their hands.”
Instead, what he recalled finding was “the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future.”
“No nation on earth,” he said, “was more deserving of peace — or more condemned to fight for it.”
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