A Perfect Spy

Начало книги

A man who has two women loses his soul.

But a man who has two houses loses his head.

Proverb

JOHN LE CARRÉ

November 2000

With the exception perhaps of the much later The Constant Gardener, A Perfect Spy remains for me the preferred novel of all my work, the one I sweated blood for, and ultimately, for that reason, the most rewarding.

All my writing life until then I had lived with the unexpressed memories of an extraordinary childhood, endured and sometimes enjoyed at the hands of an extraordinary father whose zigzag life is mirrored in my fictional character Rick Pym, father to my hero Magnus. Those members of my real-life family who had known my father and were able to read the novel were for the greater part amused and relieved by the portrait I had painted of him, though all of us knew of a darker side that is only hinted at in the novel and which today still haunts me.

Not so long ago, when The Constant Gardener was still only a twinkle in my eye, I had an idea that in the event proved abortive: I would write an autobiography, but of an experimental kind. On the left side of each double page I would write my life as I remember it now, with all the evasions and self-exculpations that are inherent in all our memories — and my own, I am sure, is no exception. And on the right side I would print the historical record wherever it could be traced, for my father had left some pretty heavy footprints in his wake, from court records and press cuttings of his first criminal conviction, to police and prison records of countries as far flung as Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Austria.

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