“There are some things one doesn’t talk about. Or shouldn’t.”

Care to guess who said that?

Back in 2016 John le Carré published what’s been termed a memoir titled The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life.

I believe I read it in 2017 and was fascinated by this glimpse into the creative mind and life of an author I considered a literary mentor. He didn’t know that, of course, but that’s how I felt about it.

But this book was more than a memoir. Le Carré divulged his inspiration for many of his novels and some of his most notable characters, which adds interest to those stories.

For example, he was assigned by British intelligence to Berlin when the Berlin Wall got its start. After witnessing some of the desperate attempts to flee from the east to the west and how the East German police dealt with these attempts so ruthlessly, he was determined to work a scene depicting that into what became The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, you know the scene.

In The Pigeon Tunnel, he spends a great deal of time on two people in his life, his father Ronnie Cornwell and the notorious traitor Kim Philby.

Le Carré, of course, was David Cornwell, and Cornwell’s father Ronnie was a conman and petty criminal who was in and out of Cornwell’s life and who tried to ingratiate himself to his son once he became a successful and wealthy author. Ronnie actually sued his son, saying that his creativity came from his father. David himself opined that his father sued him after a speech David made in which he made no allusion to his father at all.

Le Carré bailed his father out of jail on a few occasions and ultimately paid for his funeral and memorial service. To say this was a complex relationship is to understate the reality of it.

Regarding Kim Philby, le Carré barely conceals his hatred of and disdain for a man who served in the same service as he but who betrayed everything and everyone he knew. The traitor in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is based on Philby. One of the most fascinating facts of this relationship is that shortly before Philby died in 1988 in Moscow, a soviet writers organization invited le Carré to Moscow to speak to them. One of the writers asked le Carré to sign a book for a friend of his—Kim Philby. Le Carré refused.

What comes across from The Pigeon Tunnel is that le Carré —Cornwell—had all the traits as a spy that he writes about in his novels—dare I say he portrays real spies and their real life flaws, his own included. Indeed, his honesty about his foibles, including his numerous infidelities while married, he doesn’t cover over. He acknowledges them.

The book also offers commentary on social and political upheavals in the latter part of the 20^th century, namely the end of the cold war and all the issues that brought to the surface and which we still deal with today.

But I also learned some things beyond details of le Carré as a man and a writer. The power of telling stories for one, how a storyteller infuses his or her world view into their work in order to help others to make sense of that world.

I learned, or rather had reinforced, that human nature is both profound and complex. Humans are never cut and dried, all in on one side or all in on the other. We exist in a gray area that makes the world difficult to understand, but it’s a world where spies, criminals, and politics thrive.

Not to state the obvious, but all of le Carré’s works were influenced by two key aspects of life: politics and spying. This is something I’ve tried to emulate—notice I said tried, not that I’ve succeeded. Le Carré understood that the lines between good and evil are often blurred, as blurry as the lines between friend and foe in espionage. He has shown in his works that spies can have moral dilemmas and that sometimes that’s good and bad.

In The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré is also honest about, shall we say, the dark side of the writing life, the fact that the writer becomes obsessed with writing to the detriment of personal relationships. Le Carré saw this, though, as a necessary sacrifice for creativity.

What becomes clearer to me about le Carré’s writing as a result of reading The Pigeon Tunnel, is that some writers, but not le Carré, don’t realize that writing is an ongoing journey to understand human beings. Again, to make sense of a quirky and sometimes traumatizing world.

Late last year, while scrolling through Apple TV, one of the too many streaming services I have, I discovered a documentary entitled The Pigeon Tunnel. I watched the trailer and, indeed, it was a lengthy interview with Cornwell/le Carré about the book, The Pigeon Tunnel, filmed in 2022 not long before his death from pneumonia at the age of 89.

I watched it this weekend, and it’s a must-watch if you’re a le Carré fan. The unseen interviewer and the cinematography makes you feel as if you’re sitting across a table from le Carré, and he’s answering your questions. The questions and the answers go beyond what’s in the book, The Pigeon Tunnel.

You do have to have a subscription to Apple TV to view it, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a must-see. Indeed, at the end of the documentary, I realized how much we’d lost of good spy stories with his passing.

I read one review of The Pigeon Tunnel where the reviewer said the title came from an espionage term. Spies often used tunnels to move people and messages from place to place and eventually called them pigeon tunnels because pigeons had been used as messengers for centuries. However, I couldn’t confirm this from research.

In the book itself, le Carré tells the story of when he was a teenager, his father took him to Monte Carlo on a gambling spree. The casino lured pigeons to its roof and raised the hatched pigeons there so it would be “home” to them. The casino then offered high rollers the perk of pigeon shooting. These guests, shotguns in hand, had a special balcony on the casino overlooking the sea. The casino then put the pigeons in a small tunnel beneath that balcony and released them for the guests to shoot. Those that survived would return to their home on the roof to lay more eggs or be targets once again.

This stuck with young David Cornwell, and he decided he’d use the experience somehow in his later writing. In The Pigeon Tunnel and the interview, he explained that every one of his novels had “The Pigeon Tunnel” as a working title that was eventually abandoned, likely by his publishers. He did get to use it for the title of his memoir.

Of course, the quote I opened this post with is from The Pigeon Tunnel, and I’ll close this post with another: “No two spies believe in the same secrets.”

Exactly the context of each of le Carré’s books.