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John le Carre has a new book out but it will win him no prizes: he disdains honours and forbids his novels from being put forward for the Booker Prize. And a good thing too, when so many fine novels have been overlooked for the award in its
40-year history.
The Booker is posh bingo, after all, as Julian Barnes said. And why play bingo when, like le Carré, you have won the first prize in the lottery of life? His work sells millions worldwide, many of his books have been turned into films and TV dramas and he has made a lasting contribution to English literature.
For years le Carré was classified as a mere genre writer, hence his failure to be even considered for literary awards. He was undoubtedly the victim of bookish snobbery and his commercial success made envious hackles rise.
Critics scoff that he is “just” a thriller writer and thus below the literary salt. Others contest that his preachiness has got the better of his fiction and he has political ideas above his literary station.
But le Carré has never shied away from tackling the big subjects of our times: the Cold War, the pharmaceutical industry, genocide. People feared that he would have nothing to write about after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
But he has proved them wrong again and again. His latest novel, A Most Wanted Man, could not have its finger more resolutely on the geo-political pulse. It is all about terrorism, immigration, identity, surveillance, human rights and extraordinary rendition.
And what is wrong with genre fiction anyway? Le Carré's literary predecessors are Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John Buchan. It is arguably a stain on the Nobel Prize's committee that it failed to honour at least one of them.
Thankfully, le Carré is more honoured abroad than he is at home: Philip Roth described A Perfect Spy as the best English novel since the war.
Salman Rushdie has complained that le Carré's characters are too stick-figure-like to merit literary consideration. Yes, his characters may be two-dimensional and he's not so hot on women, for example. But that doesn't necessarily make le Carré less literary.
What is notable is how good a writer he is; his novels are brilliant narrative vehicles for exploring good and evil, trust and betrayal, hope and despair. They have moral depth.
This year's Booker longlisting of Tom Rob Smith's thriller Child 44 suggests the tide is turning and the crude demarcation between genre and literary fiction can soon be abandoned.
It will be too late for le Carré, alas. But we will all be reading him long after this year's Booker winner has been forgotten.
Reader views (1)
I may have to sue Mr Shakespeare, having fallen off my chair at his ludicrous suggestion that Ian Fleming could possibly have been worthy of a Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Jin, redbridge, 16/09/2008 15:36
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