Le Carre

[Monte Davis]

"And the deep background of the novel [The Spy Who Came In from the Cold]?
The sights, smells and voices that, 15 years after the end of the war,
continued to infest every corner of divided Germany? The Berlin in which
Leamas had his being was a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox.
In the early 60s I had observed it mostly from the confines of the British
Embassy in Bonn, and only occasionally in the raw. But I watched the
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/berlinwall> Wall's progress from barbed
wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the cold war going up on the
still-warm ashes of the hot one. And I had absolutely no sense of transition
from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was
one. To the hard-liners of east and west the second world war was a
distraction. Now it was over, they could get on with the real war that had
started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had been running under
different flags and disguises ever since."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/12/john-le-carre-spy-anniversary 

 

A brilliant triple fake: we here know, of course, that the *real* real war
is a good deal older.

 

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