Originally Posted by
j44ke
One of the things I cannot grasp is how he creates the sense that a character is thinking. Usually there is an omniscience in sections like that - where the 3rd person omniscient narration says something like "he began to add events in his head, remember the places each character had been..." so that the reader knows what the character is thinking about. But LeCarré's characters just think and the reader is left to wonder what they are thinking about at that moment, and then later as the story evolves, the reader realizes what was being thought about through the actions of the character. He even has the characters ask questions that don't seem important and then end up being key later in the book. As a reader, you know to look out for these things, but somehow he gets them past you. Spy craft.
LeCarré's real name was David Cornwell, and he was an intelligence officer. LeCarré was used as his pen name, because he couldn't use his real name while working for MI5. However, when Kim Philby handed over a list of British agents, Cornwell was on that list and that meant his cover was blown. So he had to retire. And that's where Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came from - the Soviet mole in The Circus.
My wife's colleague in England became acquainted with a gentleman named David Cornwell through a mutual friend. Cornwell asked if he'd mind reading a manuscript he was working on, not for editing, just his impressions. So he did and then forgot about it. Some time later he heard someone talking about a book in which this and that happened and so forth, and he realized that was the manuscript he had read, except the author's name was John LeCarré. I forget which book it was, Night Porter or Constant Gardener, one of the later books. The end result was that her colleague became a reader of manuscripts for this David Cornwell who published as John LeCarré, and he didn't tell anyone until after Cornwell died in 2020.
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