This book, The Secret Life of John Le Carré, was published on October 24th - eight years after the main book, and more pointedly, three years after the death of Le Carré himself (in December 2020) and his wife Jane (two months later).
Biographer Adam Sisman describes, early in this book, how he kept a "secret annexe" of material that he gathered for the biography but was persuaded - one might say bullied, or railroaded, or threatened, depending on how intense one wants to be - to keep that out of John Le Carré. But the dead cannot be libeled, so he was able to outlive his subject, as biographers typically do, and get the last word in.
I have not read John Le Carré - I hope to, someday, but there are probably thousands of books in that category. This one, though, was short and apparently salacious and came into my hands almost the moment it was published, so I read it. My take might then be somewhat skewed, since I've only read the appendix but not the main book. (I expect, in five years or so, that there will be an integrated revised edition of John Le Carré with this book added at the end or as addenda to particular chapters, but who wants to wait for the potential perfect edition of a book?)
Secret Life includes some material that Sisman published in shorter form soon after Le Carré's death, and is inherently varied, but it comes across as a unified book, if a short and focused one.
And what is that focus? Well, Le Carré was a really committed womanizer - Sisman has identified more than a dozen women Le Carré has affairs with from about 1970 (roughly the beginning of his second marriage) through the early Aughts. Sisman notes that he has no reason to believe he's discovered all of Le Carré's affairs; it seems clear that Le Carré pretty much always had at least one woman going on the side, and possibly multiple overlapping affairs for multiple decades.
To engage in adultery on that nearly industrial level, a man needs several things: a lot of money, a manner of life that makes it easy to change schedules quickly and get wherever he needs to at whim, and reasons to regularly travel globally. A world-famous bestselling novelist checks all of those boxes - and one who played up his experience in spycraft might well revel in the secrecy and subterfuge of clandestine relationships.
Sisman runs through the details of each of the affairs where the woman was willing to let him publish - he notes a few other cases that he's aware of, but has been asked not to give details - but what he's more interested in, I think, is the why of it. Le Carré spent a massive amount of time and energy over the course of most of his adult life - writing letters, arranging apartments, cajoling friends to serve as "dead drops," buying gifts, running expenses through a Swiss company set up by one of his publishers, traveling, and so on - just to have sex with other women, in a series of relationships that were lumpy at best and don't seem to have ended well in any case.
Clearly, he got something out of all that, but the effort feels so out of scale with the benefits that the reader wants Sisman to dig into Le Carré's psychology and present some plausible reason why he did all of that for so long. Sisman does have reasons, and I gather than readers of the big book will have more insights as well - as so often in biographies and life, the answer Sisman gives is deeply rooted in Le Carré's childhood and relationship with his con-man father.
Again, this is a short book, a focused one, and somewhat of an appendage to an existing book. It doesn't present all of the answers to anything, but adds a new angle that Sisman wasn't able to include in his main work. I continue to be amazed at what people get up to.
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