He is the son of a famous British fraudster, but he has become a world-renowned literary master and the darling of the world's top literary awards. At the same time, he was arafat's guest of honor. Because he liked his novels, Gorbachev's wife lobbied, which allowed him to enter the Soviet Union as a Westerner before the end of the Cold War, and to stay here for two weeks as a guest of the Soviet Writers' Association.
As a young man, he was a spy in a prominent position for the British government, and when the Iraq War broke out, he published a special article denouncing George W. Bush. Use fiction to expose the darkness of human nature in the Western world. Before the End of the Cold War, he predicted the end of the Cold War, and the world marveled at his precise and vicious vision.
In his later years he declined all awards, including the Booker Prize, known as the highest prize in English literature, and he even refused to accept the title of knighthood awarded to him by the royal family.
He is the famous spy novelist and British national treasure writer: John Le Carré, a man who has been hated by mainstream Western politicians, but who is addicted to his work.
And the real life experience of this old man is more thrilling than the novel he wrote. Let's walk into the life of this legendary writer together.
John Le Carré, formerly known as David John Moore Cornwell, was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England. His legendary life begins with his legendary father Donald Cornwell, who has no learning, no social value, but is full of charm.
Donald Cornwell, as a liar, cheated, forged checks, and so on. He was prosecuted twice by the King of England, and this is still officially recorded.
Her mother was the daughter of a local entrepreneur in Poole, and his father was originally an employee of her family, which was like the story of the old shang beach, and the ending of this love was the same as other stories of that era, his father did not love his mother, only her family's property. After marriage, the elder Cornwell showed amazing talent, fooled a large number of believers, and began a life of profligacy.
His mother, when he was 5 years old, ran away with someone else, and he never saw his mother again throughout his childhood, until he was 21, when they met each other at the train station, but neither was willing to repair their relationship.
His father, the elder Cornwell, was a world-wide drifter, swindling money and hiding debts, leaving the young Le Carré in England to be supervised by his assistants. "Heaven above, Bentley below" is the motto of old Conville. It seems that as long as there are these two things, nothing in the world can knock him down.
Later, when World War II broke out, the elder Cornwell successfully avoided military service on the pretext of caring for his young son.
To explain to outsiders why his father was always away, he began to make up lies that his father was an intelligence officer of the British Empire and was now serving Britain in dangerous places in his own way.
It can be said that he experienced and witnessed the art of deception from an early age, and even more ridiculously, he had to practice it himself.
However, as the old Chinese saying goes, Saion was not blessed, and all this also laid the foundation for him to enter the orthodox British intelligence agency and become a spy.
In order to give Le Carré a so-called "aristocratic" hat after the war, and in order to spend his son in the future, the elder Conville spent a lot of money to send him to Switzerland to study, when Le Carré was only 18 years old, and the woman next to his father was a downcast duchess he had never seen before.
Later, according to Le Carré's recollection in his semi-autobiographical novel The Perfect Spy, he was recruited by British intelligence at that time.
Along the way, the old Conville did not relent in the slightest, and after Le Carré became a writer, once with his agent promoting a new book in Europe, he received a call from the old Conville in the middle of the night, which was from a prison in Switzerland, and his father went to prison again, accused of hotel fraud, to put it bluntly, it was a arrears of room rates - this was a felony in Switzerland at that time. Le Carré had to pause the publicity for the new book and fly to Switzerland to wipe his dad's ass.
Le Carré himself once said of his life, saying: "I was born in deception, and later I made a living from deception.
After Le Carré became famous, he hired two private investigators to investigate his father and try to piece together his father's life.
While studying in Bern, Switzerland, Le Carré was recruited by the British government and later joined the military intelligence service to manage low-level intelligence officers in East Germany. Later, he returned to England, and after graduating with an undergraduate degree at Oxford University, entered the prestigious Eton College to teach German and French, but soon he got tired of his job as a teacher and returned to the deception industry he was familiar with, first into MI5 as an intelligence officer, and two years later he entered the famous MI6 and officially became a real spy, using the cover of the british embassy in Bonn as a second secretary to collect intelligence on East Germany. It was also at that time that he began to collect material and privately write spy novels.
In 1961, when the Construction of the Berlin Wall began, and in that year he published his first novel, The Summoning of the Dead, and to circumvent the rule that diplomats could not publish under their real names, he gave himself the French pseudonym John Le Carré, for no other reason than because Le Carré read well.
In August of the same year, after the construction of the Berlin Wall was completed, Le Carré was sent to the front line for impact assessments. This low wall, which divided Germany, inspired Le Carré, who began to create new works based on the Cold War.
Two years later, his third novel, his famous Berlin Spy, was published, full of betrayal and deception, and the British literary hero Graham Green praised it: "This is the best spy novel I have ever read."
The Cold War had entered its darkest period, and it was also the year that the Cambridge Five came to light, the biggest scandal in British intelligence history to date. In January of that year, Kim Felby defected to the Soviet Union, revealing to the Soviets a large list of British intelligence officers, including Le Carré, and the most famous of the five, and closest to the core of British power, was Donald Maclean, who was already the next foreign secretary.
The sensation of "Spy In Berlin", coupled with the scandal of the fivesome, made the intelligence and security services deeply resent Le Carré, and the CIA director at the time denounced Le Carré's book by name and undermined the prestige of intelligence work.
At this point, John Le Carré had to withdraw from intelligence circles and write full-time.
In 1965, Le Carré, who was already a full-time writer, based on his personal experience in doing intelligence work in the front line, wrote "Mirror War", which is his most realistic work, in which he expounded his understanding of the Cold War, with the help of stories, he said his own ideas, he believed that the East and the West overestimated each other, all contradictions came from the inability to communicate, and front-line intelligence personnel would lie about each other for personal benefit. However, all this must have been contrary to the mainstream state media ideas in the West at that time. As soon as the book was published, it was spurned by the mainstream Western media. Everyone agreed that Le Carré had lost the acumen of a spy novelist and was completely unworthy of his personal career as an intelligence officer.
After hearing this voice, he gambled that he would never write about the Cold War again.
So in 1983, before the End of the Cold War, he once again surpassed his peers and focused his attention on the Middle East, publishing a novel about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "The Little Drum Girl", for the creation of this book, he personally went to Palestine, and Arafat personally received him. It wasn't until many years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and the East and the West first saw each other as they really were, that people suddenly discovered that what Le Carré had written 26 years earlier was true, and that the East and the West really overestimated each other.
Always on the side of justice and exposing the pseudo-morality of the Western world is the principle of Le Carré's writing.
At the end of the Cold War, he was regarded as a treasure in the Western world, although mainstream voices still criticized him from time to time. But he didn't care about that anymore, and after becoming famous, Le Carré bought a house by the sea in Cornwall and lived in seclusion.
In 1996, "The Lie Custom Shop" set its sights on the Panama Canal, a place where soldiers must fight.
In 2000, The Eternal Gardener focused on corruption in Africa and the illegal drug experiments of the Western pharmaceutical community in impoverished parts of Africa.
In 2003, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, Le Carré published an article called "America Has Gone Crazy", denouncing the "Crusade" aggression launched by George W. Bush, and had previously written this view in his new book "Best Friends", of course, as soon as the book was published, he did usher in criticism from the mainstream Western media.
In 2006, his "London Translator Again" exposed the collusion between Western politics and Congolese politics and business.
Until his death, his work was no longer limited to the level of espionage stories, but exposed the injustices of the world and the hypocritical faces of the West.