Andrew Lycett

Through the Looking Glass

Adam Sisman brings admirable clarity to le Carré’s murky world of espionage, but there remains a mystery about his lifelong fixation with his father

‘Have you got over your father yet?’ the 26-year-old David Cornwell was asked by MI5’s head of personnel when he joined the agency in the spring of 1958. And the answer, more than half a century later, has to be ‘no’. We knew of his conman father Ronnie’s cartoonish presence in Cornwell’s life, but never the extent to which he has dominated his very being.

After leaving Lincoln College, Oxford, Cornwell taught for a couple of years at Eton, where he disliked the ‘Herrenvolk doctrine’ expounded in what he called the ‘spiritual home of the English upper classes’. So he sought a return to the secret world that he had glimpsed as a gap-year student in Bern, after leaving Sherborne and before going up to Oxford.

While in Switzerland he was approached by a British diplomat and asked to keep an eye on fellow students — a practice he maintained at Oxford, where he developed a more formal liaison with MI5. Although a member of the exclusive Gridiron Club, he was happy to adopt a left-wing persona, join the university Communist club, and monitor potential subversives.

The strain of this double life proved intolerable. During his second year at Oxford he experienced what Ann Sharp, soon to be his wife, later called a ‘mini-breakdown’, and, while he may have struggled with the compromises he made in putting love of country before that of friends, the under-lying cause was his unresolved relationship with his father, who had just gone spectacularly bankrupt (with liabilities of £1.35 million, or more than £33 million today) and whose roguish antics enliven this book, sometimes threatening to upstage its subject.

Since Ronnie’s death in 1975, Cornwell (I follow Sisman’s nomenclature) has dithered, uncharacteristically, over his memory. He has put his father into several novels (the most autobiographical being A Perfect Spy), toyed with a play about him, spent £10,000 on private detectives to probe his background, and has several times started, and scrapped, a proposed memoir, which he now says will be published next year.

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