Nadav Kander for The New York Times
John le Carré, the 20th century's pre-eminent spy writer.
On a recent Saturday morning in February, two dozen or so scent hounds streamed through the streets of St. Buryan, a small village in Cornwall, England. Behind them drifted a loose formation of men and women perched atop well-groomed horses and wearing boots, breeches and hunting coats. As the fox hunt clopped through town, John le Carré, the pre-eminent spy writer of the 20th century, sipped from a paper cup of warm whiskey punch, doled out by a local pub to riders and spectators.
At 81, he remains an enviable specimen of humanity: tall, patrician, cleanlimbed, ruddy-complected. His white hair is floppy and well cut, so much so that the actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the 2005 film version of le Carré's novel "The Constant Gardener," badgered him for the name of his barber.
Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It's an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It's egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. It's also largely futile: an actual fox is rarely cornered. When one is, a trained eagle owl is brought in to kill it.
As the final horse strode past, le Carré swallowed the dregs of his punch and crumpled his cup. His eyebrows, so thatchy and animated that they seem ready to leap off his forehead and start nibbling the shrubbery, rose as he turned toward me, his blue eyes alight, and happily declared, "At least they aren't hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones."
It is hard to blame le Carré for being in a cheerful mood. As he enters his ninth decade, he is in the midst of a hardy late-career bloom, thanks in no small part to the critical and popular success of the 2011 film "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," based on his 1974 cold-war espionage classic of the same name. Subtle, somber and intellectually dexterous, the movie, which featured Gary Oldman as le Carré's venerable MI6 master spy George Smiley, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Oldman.
The film made his backlist fly from bookstore shelves. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" alone sold more than a million copies in paperback and e-books last year — some 500,000 in the United Kingdom, 350,000 in North America and 150,000 in Germany and France. And it rekindled Hollywood's interest. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rachel McAdams recently finished shooting "A Most Wanted Man," based on le Carré's 2008 thriller indicting the war on terror, which is scheduled for release next year. Ewan McGregor will star in a film adaptation of le Carré's 2010 novel, "Our Kind of Traitor," about a British couple on a tennis holiday who become entangled in a Russian defection. What's more, Oldman may reprise his performance as Smiley when the movie version of "Smiley's People," the sequel to "Tinker Tailor," is made.
Le Carré likes to visit these film sets — two of his four adult sons, Simon and Stephen, are the producers behind several of the adaptations — but only early on, and only to voice encouragement and to sprinkle what he calls "pixie dust." After that, he leaves filmmakers alone, telling them they can call if necessary.
At the moment a new generation is stumbling upon his work, le Carré is still writing at something close to the top of his game. His 23rd novel, "A Delicate Truth," about a supposed counterterrorist operation on the British overseas territory of Gibraltar gone dismally wrong, will be out next month. The book is an elegant yet embittered indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the corporatization of warfare. It has a gently flickering love story and a jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character.
Readers like myself, mostly allergic to spy stories and genre narratives, have long been drawn to le Carré's stuff because of the wit and incisiveness he manages to insert into pained understatement. His early books sketched, as he once put it about his Smiley novels, "a kind of 'Comédie humaine' of the cold war, told in terms of mutual espionage."
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/04/john-le-carra-has-not-mellowed-with-age.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar