John Le Carré understood you His new book is an antidote to a generation of dispassionate authors

Having done stuff is part of it, but not the whole thing. After all, a lot of people have had interesting jobs. The difference between Le Carré’s books and Stella Rimington’s, say, is not in the experience they could draw on, but on the powers of observation and understanding. Like another very worldly novelist, Anthony Powell, Le Carré was superb at discerning “types”; small but distinct groups of individuals, sharing an apparently miscellaneous range of qualities. When Jim Prideaux explains to Bill Roach at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that he must be a good “watcher” — “us loners always are” — there’s someone behind that who has looked at a lot of different men and women, and understood them. This knack for analysis and categorisation sometimes got Le Carré into a little trouble with those unwilling to be so coolly categorised. Once, the film director Mike Nichols was sitting next to Mrs Thatcher at an official dinner, and said to her “My friend John le Carré says you’re a very sexy woman.” “Well,” Mrs Thatcher said. “I’m not.”

Le Carré’s worldliness consisted of these fine distinctions, and his characters — even Smiley, even Rick Pym in A Perfect Spy — are excellent examples of types we feel we could glimpse elsewhere. In that, he resembles those other very worldly writers, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Waugh and Kingsley Amis. We feel that there are other Pecksniffs out there, other Widmerpools, Tony Lasts, other Jim Dixons on the make; it is just that these are unusually good examples.

Is this kind of worldliness on the decline? It’s certainly hard to think of many novelists now who have had the kind of large-scale experience Le Carré had. Ferdinand Mount is one, having worked very close to a Prime Minister and having lived close to the great from childhood. But there’s no doubt that his novels, excellent as they are, are a little out of tune with current taste. For the most part, if a lot of current novelists want to write about public life, or a range of social settings, they are obliged to undertake research, to look at something unfamiliar from the outside. Often, it shows.

And the predominant spirit of our times might be a certain unworldliness. One of the characteristics of worldliness is taking an interest in the idiosyncrasies of very small, and perhaps very unsympathetic groups and milieu. (It’s worth remembering that Le Carré’s politics were very remote from Mrs Thatcher’s, who he found so alluring). There isn’t a lot of that sort of interest around. Recently, Sam Leith, talking about the response to David Amess’s murder, very convincingly argued that those we disagree with have melded into an “amorphous enemy mass”, not interesting individuals and small groupings, but “they’re just them: the ‘wall of gammon’, the ‘wokies’, ‘the blue-hair-and-pronouns’, the ‘Terfs’”. Reading some popular commentators, it’s striking how readily they reach for the word “we”, sometimes conflating some extraordinarily distinct groups. One such wrote a column explaining that fundamentalist Muslims and “the LGBTQ community” were basically exactly the same in the way they looked at society.

This level of astonishing unworldliness is not, perhaps, on the increase, but rarely before has it received such prominent circulation. Nor, perhaps, has it been at the expense of writers who are interested, in inconclusive ways, not in “diversity”, but in the diverse; the way that people are very different to each other, that they act very differently in different settings, and that sometimes we needn’t agree with an individual to find them fascinating, and worth spending some time with.

Some time ago, I met a middle-aged writer who declared, as a matter of pride, that she thought she could enter into any character’s mind imaginatively “except,” she went on, “a Tory MP”. Having spent time with a fair number of Tory MPs, who seemed to me to cover a fair stretch of possible human types, I thought this was a curious admission of failure. No: that kind of willed unworldliness was, in the view of the writer, a confirmation of her authenticity and even literary quality. That sort of thing is on the increase: a novelist who wrote about political actors with understanding and sympathy, whatever his or her subject’s views, would quickly find some sharp critics emerging from the unworldly grottoes of social media groupuscules.

I hope Le Carré isn’t the last of his type. The inner resources which allowed him to walk his plots from the leisurely outskirts towards the terrifying kernel, accounting convincingly for every step and milieu, never failed him — Smiley’s People, for me his masterpiece, starts from the furthest possible point. This last novel is both intricate and trimmed down, and makes a graceful gesture of farewell at the end, as the mole is hunted down, cornered, and vanishes into thin air, leaving an empty stage with no-one to take a bow. Will worldliness come back, and that will to understand, to describe, to know stuff? Sooner or later, and when it does, the readers will be waiting.

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Philip Hensher is the author of eleven novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University

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