The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life – John le Carré
Penguin Books, 2017
Convert wps files to word. “The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over several rounds of fine scotch. The collection leaves the impression of a man who has. “The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over several rounds of fine scotch. The collection leaves the impression of a man who has gone to impossible lengths for his words, bringing the farthest reaches of the globe, some of its cruelest inhabitants, and a small handful of genuine heroes.
John le Carré books have been a part of my life from an early age when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy entered it. There was something different about the book, it was doing things I’d not encountered before or at least not in the way that book did. The feeling of peeking into a mysterious world and not quite knowing what was going on, the adroit pacing of the build-up to the final scenes, the fallible characters whose allegiances were difficult to fathom, and the moral ambiguities the world in the book is full of. It also gave me another nudge towards finding my interest in Russian history and literature that is still with me.
I kept reading le Carré and I think The Pigeon Tunnel is the last book I had left to read. It’s exactly what the subtitle advertises, written with David Cornwell’s (his real name) humor, questioning intelligence, and ability to spin a good yarn. With stories about the wide range of people and places he seeks out it will be enjoyable for anyone, but most of all for those who have read the novels and are curious about where the ideas and people came from. Many chapters tell of the trips he made and meetings he had in doing research for the books. There are stories about his disastrous parents, his early life, and the potential screen adaptions of his work.
He has words of caution for his readers in the introduction, the stories he tells are from memory and memories aren’t the most reliable especially for those who blend “experience with imagination“.
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.
An ongoing theme that crops up throughout are the reactions the author gets from others about the books and himself. There are his former secret service colleagues who are furious or envious (one came close to clocking him at a diplomatic reception), or the belief held by some people that Cornwell had all sorts of pull in the secret world. He’s amused and exasperated in turn.
Affinity luminar. It’s fascinating, if disturbing, to read about the unspeakable Ronnie and unknowable Olive, parents no one should be saddled with; his flight from England to Bern at sixteen where he attended Bern University and the first approach from the service happened; his love for German language and literature at a time when anything German wasn’t popular; and his often unsuccessful efforts to get away from Ronnie. His embrace of German language and literature he gave to George Smiley, and much of his early life and the people in it was mined for the brilliant A Perfect Spy. He wonders what his life might have been like if he hadn’t done that first runner.
I spend a lot of odd moments these days wondering what my life would have looked like if I hadn’t bolted from my public school, or if I had bolted in a different direction. It strikes me now that everything that happened later in life was the consequence of that one impulsive adolescent decision to get out of England by the fastest available route and embrace the German muse as a substitute mother.
The Pigeon Tunnel Stories From My Life
Initially he worked for MI5 until he became disillusioned with the kind of work he was doing and the mentality of the upper echelons. After a few years he moved across the park to MI6, but he is grateful to MI5 for one thing. Bandrich driver download. The most senior officers had rigorous expectations for written English and the exacting standards he learned at their hands have served him well. MI6 posted him to Germany, where he watched what was happening there in the early years after the war as all too many old Nazis retained power to the disgust of the younger generation. In the meantime he saw his first book published.
The Pigeon Tunnel Summary
The writing continues, working for the secret service does not. As Tinker Tailor is going to press, Cornwell is on a visit to Hong Kong and realizes a scene he set there and researched while at home is incorrect. He swears to himself that he won’t ever again set anything in a place he hasn’t visited and researched. He decides it’s time for him to move on from his past experiences in the secret world and explore worlds that are unfamiliar to him. This starts the research trips that take him from Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge is attacking, to a meeting in Leningrad with Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner where the KGB indulges in silly, nasty behavior to harass them. There are the surreal trips to the Middle East and Panama. He visits the ‘new Russia’ and meets all sorts from artists to criminal gangsters. He has some wonderful stories about all the great films that were never made of his books.
The Pigeon Tunnel Review
But with a certain amount of relief he returns home to settle in to the writing he loves doing, always in longhand as he “enjoys drawing the words”.
I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home to pick over my booty.
In the preface le Carré tells the repugnant story about where the title comes from and a reader is left thinking about how it might apply to the writer’s life. That question comes to the fore when reading about his parents and his understanding that he still doesn’t understand them, but keeps trying to.
Overall though, reading the book is like listening to a good raconteur telling his stories over a couple of bottles of wine, maybe sitting in front of a fire in the little Swiss chalet he built with profits from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold while snow is falling outside.