What John le Carré Learned in Corfu

The Atlantic

4 days ago

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Many of my most memorable reading experiences are conflated with incongruous settings. I first picked up Slaughterhouse-Five in Venice, on the recommendation of a fellow backpacker. I read Death in Venice, however, in Amsterdam, where the canals thinly evoked Thomas Mann's pestilent waterways. And if you ask me about San Sebastián, the lovely Basque seaside town, I'll flash back to the mind-blowing middle section of Cloud Atlas, which is set in postapocalyptic Hawaii. For authors, too, a place can serve as more of a catalyst than a setting. They go somewhere on holiday and end up learning something about their characters—or themselves. This is what happened to John le Carré in Corfu, and it's why, for this week's installment of The Atlantic 's literary-travel series, ' The Writer's Way,' Honor Jones chose to investigate le Carré's 600-page masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, by traveling to a place that takes up only a few pages in the novel.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section:
'If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere,' Jones explains: 'Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu.' But consider the predicament of le Carré's protagonist, Magnus, an MI6 agent who has betrayed his country to the Communist Czechs and is lying low in Greece under cover of a family vacation. 'If you're trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found, you don't go to the obvious places,' Jones writes. 'You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they're false leads. You look where the trail is colder.'
Le Carré himself had a chance encounter in Corfu that made its way into A Perfect Spy, in a scene that opens up a central theme of the novel—the legacy of a father (Magnus's but also le Carré's) who was a monstrous, charismatic narcissist. It was on the Greek island that le Carré ran into a man who'd worked for his father, a globe-trotting con artist. 'We was all bent, son,' the former henchman told him. 'But your dad was very, very bent.'
Because great novels are rarely on the nose, le Carré sets a fictionalized version of this encounter in England. Corfu instead becomes the place where Magnus's Czech contact, the mysterious Axel, tries to entice the Brit to join him behind the Iron Curtain. The island, for centuries beset by repeated invasions and then an onslaught of tourism, holds broader thematic significance for Jones: 'Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.'
As it happens, I'm going to stop in Bern next week on a European rail vacation. The Swiss city takes up many more pages in A Perfect Spy than Corfu does; it's where Magnus, as a very young man, first meets Axel. But I've already read the novel, so I'll pack a different one. Inspired by The Atlantic 's new list of staffers' recommendations for must-read books, I'm going to finally dig into Hernan Diaz's Trust, which is set primarily in New York. So although I'll be in Europe, I'll probably be thinking of home.
Chasing le Carré in Corfu
By Honor Jones
If you're trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found, you don't go to the obvious places.
What to Read
Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow
Bellow's thinly veiled 2000 roman à clef about his friendship with the star academic Allan Bloom—the philosopher who wrote the best-selling jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind —is a tender portrait of its subject. But Bellow's novel is as much about the institutional culture that shaped Bloom. It is a paean to academia as an enterprise that works to sort ideas that are base and quotidian from those that are noble and timeless, and its titular character embodies this faith in the professoriate as a kind of secular priesthood. Abe Ravelstein is a study in contradictions. Devoted to a life of the mind, he approaches reading the classics as a kind of soul-craft, and he's preoccupied with the wisdom of ancient philosophers, poets, and statesmen; yet he also nurtures an irrepressible fondness for modern luxuries such as Armani suits, Cuban cigars, and 'solid-gold Montblanc pens.' The irony of Ravelstein is that its protagonist's celebrity is a symptom of the same commodification of knowledge that is eroding the things he most holds dear. Read 25 years later, the novel is an artifact of its time: The diminishment of the university's purpose that Bellow witnessed feels much more advanced today. —
Out Next Week
📚 Flashout, by Alexis Soloski
📚 Kicking the Hornet's Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East From Truman to Trump, by Daniel E. Zoughbie
Your Weekend Read
When It Feels Good to Root for a Bad Guy
By David Sims
The local sheriff in Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the film's Bickle, though his final showdown is a far more absurd spectacle than the one in Taxi Driver. Aster's film is frightening, yes—but it's a dark and lacerating comedy first and foremost, playing out the power fantasies that fueled many an online conspiracy theory in the pandemic's early days (and still do now). And although Cross may not be as crushingly lonely as Bickle, he does share the character's escalating sense of paranoia. By plunging the viewer into this chaotic inner world, Aster illustrates the dissonant appeal of being enmeshed in the perspective of, and maybe even rooting for, an individual committed to their belief in justice—even if that commitment can border on sordid.