Publication: THE PIGEON TUNNEL: STORIES FROM MY LIFE by John le Carré

I do love a good spy novel, and particularly those from the WWII / Cold War era – I’m especially fond of John le Carré, Helen MacInnes, Eric Ambler, John Lawton, Aly Monroe, Graham Greene and Len Deighton. Not that I’m any kind of expert on the spy novel – I’m happy to concede that I’m probably the only person who believes Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is one of the finest spy novels ever written.
  Anyway, and speaking of the great spy novelists, I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré last year, and I’m looking forward to le Carré’s own memoir, THE PIGEON TUNNEL (Viking), which is published later this week. Quoth the blurb elves:

‘Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.’
  From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he’s writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year’s Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

  THE PIGEON TUNNEL is published on September 8th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Review: THE OUTSIDER: MY LIFE IN INTRIGUE by Frederick Forsyth

“Where do you get your ideas?” is a question most writers come to dread, and may well be one of the reasons why Frederick Forsyth has finally published his autobiography. The author of best-selling thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Fourth Protocol (1984), The Kill List (2013) and many more, Forsyth has lived a storied life, and one that has, as the subtitle ‘My Life in Intrigue’ suggests, directly impacted on his fiction.
  Born in 1938, the young Forsyth grew up a child of the Cold War. A flair for languages and travel ensured that he was fluent in French, Spanish, German and Russian before he left school, although his true passion was flying. He was also, it seems, something of a lightning conductor for trouble. In 1958, for example, aged just 19 and with a month to kill at the end of this RAF fighter pilot training, Forsyth decided to use the time to travel to the Middle East, via Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon. “I had been away three weeks,” he writes as he concludes his eventful holiday, “experiencing one mid-air near disaster, one civil war and two uprisings.”
  Such was not untypical of Forsyth’s life. “We all make mistakes,” he begins this book, “but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one.” That particular snafu occurred when Forsyth was living in East Berlin as a Reuters correspondent in the early 1960s, where he would on occasion, and despite the shadowing presence of the Communist regime, moonlight on behalf of the British secret service. Nor was that the last time Forsyth would operate as an ‘asset’: while never a spy, Forsyth regularly made himself available to facilitate operations run by the SIS / MI6.
  Indeed, so packed with incident was the first half of his life – he covered the Biafran War as a BBC foreign correspondent, got involved with Russian princesses, romanced beautiful Czechoslovakian spies, flew with the Red Arrows – that Forsyth doesn’t get around to talking about his fiction until we’re about two-thirds of the way through this memoir. A hard-bitten, cynical journalist by 1970, Forsyth was still naïve enough as a novelist not to realise that a thriller about an assassination attempt on a living historical figure – Charles De Gaulle – simply wouldn’t work. The result, The Day of the Jackal, was a ground-breaking tour-de-force of realism, largely due to Forsyth’s insider knowledge of guarding De Gaulle, garnered from a Corsican ex-Foreign Legion mercenary Forsyth met while working in Biafra.
  And on the anecdotes go. While living in Ireland in the 1970s, Forsyth becomes a regular dinner-party companion of the ‘amusing rogue’ Charles Haughey, who offers the author the position of Senator. For The Cobra (2010), and now in his seventies, Forsyth flew into the ‘West African hell-hole’ of Guinea-Bissou to research cocaine-smuggling, “where I had staged through forty years earlier, perched on a crate of mortars, when a bullet came through the floor and went through the ceiling.”
  He can be forthright in his criticism of certain aspects of British foreign policy, and pulls no punches when detailing his time working for the BBC, but for the most part Forsyth makes for an urbane narrator, the stories unfolding in the manner of tall tales and outrageous yarns swapped beside the blazing fire of an exclusive club, and best enjoyed with a glass of something amber in hand. It’s Boy’s Own stuff, of course, and overall The Outsider is an enthralling account of a life that would make for a thrilling, if delightfully implausible, novel. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner