The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

by John Le Carré

Hardcover, 2016

Call number

BIO LEC

Collection

Publication

Viking (2016), Edition: First Edition, 320 pages

Description

Biography & Autobiograph Politic Nonfictio HTML:â??Recounted with the storytelling Ă©lan of a master raconteur â?? by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy.â? -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le CarrĂ©, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.  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, le CarrĂ© has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le CarrĂ© 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 the opening bars of Beethovenâ??s Fifth; visiting Rwandaâ??s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Yearâ??s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smileyâ??s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le CarrĂ© endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le CarrĂ© gives us a glimpse of a writerâ??s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member msf59
“
We all reinvent our pasts
but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them.”

“I’m a liar
born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”

David Cornwell, aka John Le
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Carre, is no armchair author. He has lived the life and in this beautifully written memoir, by one of the best spy novelists of our time, he takes the reader on a journey, that touches down in many historical and personal locales, over six decades. His years, working for MI6, the British intelligence service, working in Hollywood, interviewing terrorists and meeting luminaries like, Arafat, Richard Burton, Andrei Sakharov and Stanley Kubrick. His warm friendship with Alec Guinness, aka George Smiley. And those are just snippets, of what is in these glorious pages but what really stands out, for me, is the profile of his father, who was a true con-man and rapscallion.

I think I have only read about six of his books and mostly the earlier classic stuff. This has inspired me to pick him back up again, especially his later work.

Le Carre also narrates the audiobook and does a wonderful job, with wit and nuance. The perfect storyteller. Do yourself a big favor and track this one down.
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LibraryThing member thorold
A nice collection of short autobiographical pieces from the established master of the spy-story. No big revelations, of course - he's still as professionally tight-lipped as ever about what was involved in the "bit of this and that" he did for MI5 and MI6 in his time - but a lot of charming little
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anecdotes about his experiences as a working novelist, mostly cast in the classic English self-deprecatory mould where the name-dropping is always balanced by some kind of embarrassment - an invitation to No. 10 from Mrs Thatcher, when it turns out that the real guest of honour (the recently-elected Ruud Lubbers) has never heard of him; meetings with Arafat who treats him with great affection one day and has forgotten him the next; encounters with famous film directors who go on not to make films of his books; leaders who wrongly assume that he's an expert they can consult about espionage and security; hotel concierges who don't know him but still remember his conman father with affection, and so on.

All written with his characteristic economy and eye for jargon and dialogue, and very entertaining.
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LibraryThing member darwin.8u
"if you were reporting on human pain, you had a duty to share it"
- John le Carré, quoting a dictum of Graham Greene, in 'The Pigeon Tunnel"

First, a disclosure, I was given this book by Viking Books. These types of offers I typically refuse. I don't like feeling under obligation to review or even
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read a book just because it was given to me. I might do it for friends, but even then, I am VERY picky about what I read. I have thousands of unread books and thousands of others I that are on my radar to read. I usually feel a bit like Melville's Bartleby, aroused only to the level of wanting to reply "I would prefer not to.". But this is John le Carré. Anyone who knows me knows I'VE been pimping John le Carré books for years. My goal is to be a le Carré completest by the end of next year (I still have yet to read The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, Absolute Friends, Our Game, or The Naive and Sentimental Lover) but there is a sadness that comes with finishing, with having no country left to visit or no book left to read. I, however, own them all. Often multiple copies. So, how could I refuse a free le Carré? Also, so I wouldn't feel completely like I was writing for free books, I also went out to purchase the Audiobook so I could listen to le Carré talk about his own life.

Surprisingly, this is le le Carré's first memoir. That both feels a bit strange and a bit right. First, le Carré is a master at timing and also understands when is the proper point to introduce a character and how much to show. John le Carré, the pen name for David Cornwell, is often reluctant to do interviews (their is a bit about that in this book) and is a bit publicity shy. He isn't Pynchon or Salinger for sure, but the energy of pimping his stuff and his reluctance sometimes to delve into the narrative of his own life (he worked for awhile for both MI-5 and MI-6) and his relationship with his father seems to be something he is often reluctant to discuss. Ironically, these two issues feed his fiction heavily. His father and his relationship with his father's ghost seems to push through most of his fiction. So, too, obviously does le Carré time as David Cornwell the spy. There is a thin, unbleached muslin shroud between fact and fiction (le Carré talks about his in this book). Perhaps le Carré's greatest book, A Perfect Spy, which Philip Roth (yes, that Philip F'ing Roth) once called "the best English novel since the War" was grown out of David Cornwell's relationship with his own father.

The memoir itself is filled with anecdotes and loosely goes from past to present, but also breaks time's arrow to describe certain relationships with certain people or movies made of his books. I loved especially the parts of this book where le Carré writes about Graham Greene and the craft of writing. I knew le Carré got around, but after reading the memoir, I can safely say he belongs with George Orwell, Graham Greene, William T. Vollmann, Paul Theroux family of adventure writers whose fiction is informed from the trenches. They don't just know where some bodies are actually buried, they may have seen the corpse AND the murder.

So, why only four stars? Because I'm judging this book against his best fiction. This is a fun memoir and a very good le Carré. Again, going back to how this is his first memoir, I wonder why now? I hope he is not done with fiction. I hope this is not him saying, I'm done. He is in his 80s, and after he is done, I'm not sure what to do. We have been waiting for 400 years for another playwright to equal Shakespeare. How many centuries will we have to wait for another le Carré. Dear GOD, I fear too long.
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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
John le Carré is widely accepted as perhaps the greatest writer of spy fiction. I would, however, go further and suggest that he is, quite simply, one of the greatest novelists in any genre. His novels display an acute understanding of the human condition, and his characters are always so finely
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drawn that the reader feels he knows them.

The Pigeon Tunnel is not a conventional autobiography but, rather, a selection of memoirs and includes among its highlights le Carré’s pen portraits of Richard Burton (who so memorably brought the tortured Alec Leamas to the big screen in the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and Alec Guinness (who I can’t avoid seeing whenever I reread any of the stories featuring George Smiley), together with a sad encounter with Fritz Lang. The longest individual piece focuses on Ronnie, the author’s errant father, whose fictional counterpart enlivened the largely autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy.

The pieces are all written with le Carré’s glorious prose which though immediately recognisable remains inimitable. There are some self-deprecating notes about his time in the intelligence world, though, predictably, we learn few actual details. He also tells us nothing about his time as a teacher at Eton – indeed this spell of his life, about which I would love to learn more, is only referred to a couple of times, and then only in passing. We do learn a little about the mechanics of his writing – like Iris Murdoch, his novels are written by hand rather than typed – and we are given a slight insight into the research he undertakes for his books, though most of his work remains a mystery. As with Anthony Powell’s marvellous Dance to the Music of Time sequence, in which the reader learns next to nothing about the author even after reading twelves volumes of a novel so clearly based upon the writer’s life, we don’t emerge from this book knowing very much more about John le CarrĂ©. That doesn’t matter, though. The book is enchanting and beguiling in its own right, and a joy to read.
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LibraryThing member annbury
A wonderful book. For one, it s a pleasure to read LeCarre agajn. Second, although I read some of these
pieces in the New Yorker or the Times Magazine, most of it was new to me. Third, I had no idea, despite having read his biography recently, how much research he puts into his writing. All told,
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the book is a story of how the author goes about creating characters and the various run ins he has with American and other movie directors and writers.It does not take anything away from his bio.
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LibraryThing member bobbieharv
I decided to tag this wonderful book as non-fiction rather than a memoir because it is really a series of autobiographical essays, a style I found very rewarding. He is a wonderful writer and I've read most of his novels. Here he is intelligent, wry, a canny observer, and ultimately reserved: all
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characteristics of a good spy. I just loved it.
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LibraryThing member gmmartz
John Le Carre is in my personal pantheon of great novelists. 'The Pigeon Tunnel', a collection of autobiographical stories describing his background, writing methods, wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and adventures in building his novels, was a pleasure to experience for a fan like me.

The
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writing in The Pigeon Tunnel is great, a little 'breezier' than his novels but that's to be expected. It's first rate. The stories are the draw. Not only was his pre-writing career fascinating, but the wide range of people he's interacted with over his life and the funny, exciting, and dangerous actions he writes about are incredible. He ought to make a book out of some of them.... wait, he did!

What surprised me the most was the care LeCarre takes in crafting his stories, the education he undertakes to understand the countries, people, politics, and situations he writes about. I'm not a writer so I'm not sure how prevalent some of his techniques are among authors, but I was blown away by how meticulous and unique his approach is to his work.

LeCarre (which is just a pen name, by the way) seems to be the self-deprecating sort so I think he'd consider this book a trifle among the greats he's authored, but it was a joy for me to experience. If you're a fan, I highly recommend it.
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LibraryThing member bibliovermis
This book is both an interesting memoir of the world as it was and a prescient observation of the world that is. Like many memoirs, it's not entirely cohesive and has some meandering chapters, especially toward the end.
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
As fun as a memoir can be. Jumping all over the place. Little time is spent on his childhood, except to state at regular intervals how ridiculous it, and his father, was. The chapters on Richard Burton and Le Carre's father are worth the price of admission alone.
LibraryThing member SigmundFraud
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John Le Carré is just as the title suggests, stories. They appear chronologically. Some have to do with his personal life and some to do with his books. He began as a spy but he said he was a writer before he was a spy. The stories are haphazard but
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interesting nonetheless. If you are interested in Le Carre I recommend this book. He also has a new George Smiley book just published that may interest you as well.
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LibraryThing member hemlokgang
Parts of this memoir are fascinating, while other parts drag. I think it would be different if I knew more history of British espionage. It is abundantly clear that John Lecarre has led an absolutely fascinating life!
LibraryThing member bmcbook
Ambiguity of good and bad
LibraryThing member nmele
Le Carre tells some interesting and entertaining stories, and he reveals something about the research he does on his books. I was interested in many of his experiences, but his most affecting stories concern his search for his mother and his attempt to capture his father on the page.
LibraryThing member Aficionado
Mit Witz, Selbstironie und voller Lebensweisheit erzÀhlt John LeCarré aus seinem Leben. Von seiner Kindheit und Jugend, geprÀgt von der Abwesenheit der Mutter und der komplexen Beziehung zum Vater. Von seiner Zeit als Student in Bern und an der britischen Botschaft in Bonn, von seinen Reisen und
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Begegnungen. Er blickt zurĂŒck auf Jahrzehnte, in denen der Lauf der Welt scheinbar so leicht anhand von Spionagegeschichten zu skizzieren war. Ein Leben voller Material fĂŒr seine Romane. Und bis heute gilt: John Le CarrĂ© ist ein Seismograph der Entwicklung der westlichen Demokratien: Die Zusammenarbeit zwischen BND und NSA, das Drama von Guantanamo, die russische Mafia oder die Machenschaften der Pharmaindustrie in Afrika - lange bevor diese Themen Schlagzeilen machten, fanden sie sich in seinen Romanen. Vor allem Marionetten, der zu großen Teilen in Hamburg spielt, wurde als ein kluger Kommentar zur Arbeit der Geheimdienste nach dem 11. September 2001 verstanden.
Der Autor: John Le CarrĂ©, 1931 geboren, studierte in Bern und Oxford. Er war Lehrer in Eton und arbeitete wĂ€hrend des Kalten Kriegs kurze Zeit fĂŒr den britischen Geheimdienst. Seit nunmehr fĂŒnfzig Jahren ist das Schreiben sein Beruf. Er lebt in London und Cornwall.
Die Memoiren eines Jahrhundert-Autors: Was macht das Leben eines Schriftstellers aus? Mit dem Welterfolg Der Spion, der aus der KĂ€lte kam gab es fĂŒr John Le CarrĂ© keinen Weg zurĂŒck. Er kĂŒndigte seine Stelle im diplomatischen Dienst, reiste zu Recherchezwecken um den halben Erdball - Afrika, Russland, Israel, USA, Deutschland -, traf die MĂ€chtigen aus Politik- und Zeitgeschehen und ihre heimlichen Handlanger. John Le CarrĂ© ist bis heute ein exzellenter und unabhĂ€ngiger Beobachter, mit untrĂŒglichem GespĂŒr fĂŒr Macht und Verrat. Aber auch fĂŒr die komischen Seiten des weltpolitischen Spiels.
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LibraryThing member camharlow2
Those looking for a definitive autobiography by John le Carre may be disappointed with this book. Rather than a chronological account of his life, he has written a collection of vignettes from his life which is arranged in themes. Some have appeared in print previously in journals and newspapers. ,
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and are nonetheless revealing of the author. He admits that some of the tales may be altered by misremembering with the passing of time and also by the fact that he has rewritten them into his books. But le Carre also reveals how some of the episodes from his life have been borrowed and adapted to inspire events and characters in his novels, sometimes long after the original observation.
‘Stories for my life’ is an apt subtitle for the book. With recollections directly from the author, it makes a delightful and revealing companion volume to Andrew Sisman’s recent biography of John le Carre.
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LibraryThing member nhlsecord
Very interesting stories of le Carre's life and his travels to do research for his novels, as well as his experiences while having movies made from his books. All through the book there are hints of his own difficult life which are explained in an excellent ending. This would make a great movie!
LibraryThing member addunn3
Very interesting - and historically fascinating - collection from a gifted author. Well worth the read.
LibraryThing member DGRachel
I read this in a combination of print and audiobook read by the author. I loved le Carre's narration and found the stories within to be fascinating. The end was a bit of a surprise, and I turned the page expecting more. So, the way it ended was a bit disappointing. I enjoyed the details of events
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and people who inspired some of his novels. A great read for fans.
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LibraryThing member tmph
Wonderfully personal. Pure le Carré writing. Utterly fascinating.
LibraryThing member StuartEllis
This is a set of articles, depicting incidents in the life of le Carré. They are, of course, brilliantly written: entertaining, perceptive, and cut with a quiet sense of good humour. There are a few stories from his career as a junior intelligence officer, but most are from his life as a novelist,
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which turns out to be truly amazing.

It seems that le Carré loved to travel to the places that he wrote about, and people liked to talk to him. There's a huge cast of characters here from the various worlds that he touched: politics, espionage, journalism, media and the arts. He met some of the most famous and important people of the 20th Century, as well as many less famous but fascinating people. A name check from this book includes: Margaret Thatcher, Yasser Arafat, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Fritz Lang, Andrei Sakharov, a head of MI6 and two heads of the KGB. The not-famous people are an even more extraordinary mix, including a great Czech actor who defected to become a doctor, a French woman who rescued orphans from war zones, the American journalist who may also have been a Nazi-hunting vigilante, and le Carré's larger-than-life con-man father.

I really did not want this book to end: the stories that we get are clearly only a small slice of his adventures.
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LibraryThing member Ma_Washigeri
Enjoyed these stories a lot until about half way through - when they began to bore me - and then there were definitely sections which should have been edited out. Glad he left the stories about his father to last as the enjoyment rocketed up again. I don't really care how much actual truth there is
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in them - I suspect quite a lot - because a bit like a novel being imaginary, there is a deeper truth that shines (from the best bits at least).
So the 3-star is an average - a mix of 2, 3 and 4 stars.
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LibraryThing member waldhaus1
I got more insight into the author from this autobiographical fragment than from the biography I recently read. Perhaps naively I felt I got to know him and gained an understanding of his background. The events are presented as interesting stories.
LibraryThing member AnaraGuard
Although many of the individual anecdotes and accounts were interesting--particularly to fans of LeCarre--the book as a whole felt disjointed to me. It lacked a narrative arc which made it difficult to stick with it. I wanted much more of Chapter 33, about the fascinating Ronnie, and could have
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done with a little less of some of the more political sections.
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LibraryThing member pgmcc
"The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my life" is exactly what it says in the subtitle, stories from the life of John Le Carré, or David Cornwell if we are to use his real name, the only name he responded to.

I came to this book as someone who greatly admires Cornwell’s books and articles, has watched
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the majority of the screen adaptations of his novels, and who has enjoyed the few interviews he has given and that I have watched or read. You might claim I was biased in a way that means I was bound to enjoy this book. I always say, “There is no harm being biased when you are right*.”

Biased or not, this book did not give me any evidence that my admiration for David Cornwell and his works has been misplaced.

The structure of this book supports dipping in and out. There are many short sections describing incidents of note, or describing a character who provided the inspiration for one of Cornwell’s characters or who was a significant person in their own right and whom Cornwell encountered in his life, either incidentally or through his efforts to do research. I enjoyed the whole book and found the bite-size snippets for the author’s life to be intriguing and informative.

While Cornwell did not describe or discuss any of his activities while working in MI5 and MI6, the incidents he did discuss left me with a sense of a parallel world of intrigue and secrecy that most people do not see in their everyday life. There was a sense of everything you know not necessarily being real. I was reminded of Umberto Eco’s stories that, to me, were mostly about showing how the world we know, the history in the books, and the actions of governments and public figures, are not really the world that is around us.

David Cornwell’s father, Ronnie, was a conman, serial seducer, and a real charmer. The longest, most intense and most harrowing part of the book to read was, “Son of the author’s father”. In this thirty-five page chapter, Cornwell describes incidents that shed light on his relationship with his father and his mother, but predominantly his father. It was the one part of the book where one could get a sense of real angst and emotion about the matter being discussed. He describes how he had investigators seek out evidence to verify the veracity of his own memories. This chapter struck me as very personal.

If someone asked me to recommend a single section from this book, and I had to give a one section answer, I would propose the Introduction. The Introduction is twelve pages full of interesting detail and background, but also a warning. Cornwell explains that in describing the incidents he has been true to his memory, but goes on to say that his writing career has involved using memory and imagination, that his previous occupation as a spy in MI5 and MI6 was, by its nature, prone to deception, and that he was brought up by a father whose whole life was devoted to confidence tricks. In this context he questions the concept of “pure memory” and begs the question of how accurate his own memory might be.

If that hypothetical person were to ask me to recommend a single section from this book, my real response would be, “Read the whole book”.

Would I recommend this book?
Most definitely.

Who would I recommend it to?
Anyone.

Would I read more works by this author?
Certainly.

Did this book inspire me in any way?
I am inspired to read the Sisman biography of David Cornwell and to read the few Le Carré novels I have not yet reached.

*”Right” as in “correct”; not “Right” as in “politics”.
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LibraryThing member brakketh
Stories drawn from the life of John le Carre, I found them less engaging than his fiction.

ISBN

0735220778 / 9780735220775
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