Surveying the work of the spy novelist, Nick Cohen notes the corrosive politics found in both his work and his public statements. The latter, writes Cohen, reflect all of the worst tendencies of Britain’s old right and new left—including their “Jew obsession”:
Connoisseurs of [le Carré’s] public
statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le Carré believes
that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on behalf of the
imperial American hegemon (check), which is itself controlled by a
conspiracy of right-wingers (check), who are pulling our puppet strings
at the behest of—guess who?—the Jews (full house!). Or as le Carré
explained, the [Jewish] neoconservatives are “appointing the state of
Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global
policy.” [...]
Then there is the self-pity, that most
deplorable affectation of Western intellectuals who have never once
faced the smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their
writing. At one point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself
with the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously
survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that
when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and
threatened Salman Rushdie’s life, the Klemperer-of-our-time opined that
Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of
Islam. [...]
Le Carré has the vices of the old conservative British establishment,
and not just in his Jew obsession. He resents the American empire
usurping British power and leaving us as its poodle, and engages in a
quasi-colonial denial of the autonomy of the peoples of the poor world.
But he also has the old establishment’s virtues, most notably its
ability to appeal to a vision of a better England which the Left can
rarely match.
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