The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life - Memoir by John le Carré | Spy Thriller Author Biography | Perfect for Book Clubs & Espionage Fans
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Product Description
DON’T MISS THE PIGEON TUNNEL DOCUMENTARY—NOW PLAYING IN SELECT THEATERS AND STREAMING ON AppleTV+The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carré, the legendary author of A Legacy of Spies.“Recounted with the storytelling élan of a master raconteur—by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesFrom 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 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 the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’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 Smiley’s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré 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 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.
Customer Reviews
This book is a veritable feast of intriguing and exotic tales from the life of world traveler and foreign-service expert John le Carré.You don't have to have read anything else by le Carré to enjoy it. Having seen literally any of the films or miniseries based on his works will suffice. As for myself, I had never managed to get into any of his novels, but I had seen adaptations (miniseries/films) of nine of them.As it is, le Carré's reputation as a great storyteller is well in evidence here. And many of the stories are in highly unusual situations, meeting and conversing with or interviewing highly unusual people of all stripes -- from the obscure and desperate to the famous, criminal, and/or infamous. Many of his encounters have resonance with historical events of the past 70 years right up to the present moment.Towards the end of the book, he gets very personal about his parents and upbringing (a sort of reversal of the order of events in most memoirs). That structure works well in this memoir, since his father was so outré as to have sucked all the import out of the sequence of events had this material been presented at the beginning.All in all, if you are fond of le Carré or any of his works or screen adaptations, do check out this memoir -- I think you will find it very rewarding and very unusual.
