My dad died, suddenly, of cancer at the age of 64, a little more than ten years ago. My stepmother disposed of that handgun in his sock drawer, but there were other things I kept: a microfilm camera, a pocket watch, a handful of gold coins, 1980s mail-order forms for pornography, his signet ring. He also had some notebooks and journals with pages torn out. Fathers in my childhood were mysterious, reticent, hard to read. Mine could be all of these things, though he was affectionate too and even, later, given to sentimentality. His books and his other enthusiasms—bicycles, 1960s folk music, downhill skiing—were a way to get to know him.
John le Carré died on Saturday at the age of 89. In the years since my own father’s death, I’ve made a project of reading all of le Carré’s work, from the early procedural mysteries, to the breathtakingly complex middle-period novels (the Karla trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s Game, is his masterwork), to the angry leftist post-9/11 novels. I adored—probably more than it deserved—last year’s Agent Running in the Field mostly because it existed. A solid spy novel, written by an octogenarian le Carré, with superb sequences on, of all things, the badminton court. Le Carré seemed immortal, a writer who had lived many lives (including 16 years as a British spy), and wrote beautifully, and rarely gave interviews, and persisted, in a way my own father did not.
I felt a piercing sadness at his death—and the same, all over again, at my father’s. I think of Dad reading by lamplight. I think of le Carré’s intelligence officers, assembled around a dimly lit table, with their paper cups of weak tea. I recall the sensation, thrilling, of decoding the first chapters of The Honourable Schoolboy, a few years after Dad died, and feeling that I had achieved something hard-won and permanent. I have a few le Carré books on my shelf that I still haven’t gotten to: Single & Single, A Perfect Spy, his memoir Pigeon Tunnel. I will read each one. Riddles exist to be solved.