The Pigeon Tunnel
"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 war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carre 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 Eve 1982 with 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 Carre endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to…
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What Hacker News says
- A few months ago I listened to Casino Royale (narrator Dan Stevens, pretty good) and was kind of bummed at just how poorly it read. It's an OK story with very middling language, badly in need of an editor especially around the end. I was surprised that it received so much popularity when written. But maybe it only could get popular at the time, when the English were in need of a certain kind of hero.
I decided to re-read (via audiobook) my favorite John Le Carre novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (narrator Michael Jayston, one of the best audiobook performances I have ever listened to). So wildly different to have them back-to-back. It made me appreciate Le Carre all the more.
Speaking of audiobooks, Le Carre's own memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life is read by himself and is a must-listen if you like his books. To hear him tell his own tales, with his own accents for the people in his life, definitely one of the cases where the audiobook format is superior.
- His autobiography, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life is very good, and an excellent audiobook because it is read by him, recounting his own memories and doing his own accents of other people he once knew.
The book is a little more compelling if you've read a lot of his work but even if you've only read one and loved it, its almost certainly worth your time.
- If you've not read The Pigeon Tunnel you definitely should, its largely based around his father's exploits https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/08/the-pigeon-tun...
- Le Carré said this in the interview about his life (The Pigeon Tunnel):
“At a certain age, you want the answer. You want the rolled up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. The trouble is that by then, you’re the very people who know best that the inmost room is bare.”
- I had an odd path to reading Le Carre novels - I first read The Pigeon Tunnel, his autobiography. After that I decided to read all of his novels... and then after the surprise ending in The English Patient, I told my partner I was done with them. I'd guess they're about 50% unhappy endings, 25% happy, 25% unresolved. Then a few weeks later I'd inevitably pick up a new one. All I have left to read now is The Russia House.
