"The imprint of personality" (John le Carré/The Pigeon Tunnel) (Patreon)

“Sometimes you’re a spectral figure, sometimes you’re God. And sometimes you’re present.”

In his posthumous appearance in The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré signals to documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that he’s just as adept at interviewing furtive and powerful figures as Morris is. In his years interrogating targets for MIs Five and Six, le Carré learned all the interview techniques Morris uses.

“It’s the bonding, real or artificial, that begins the conversation,” Cornwell says. (He would have made a good reporter. Journalism is basically espionage..)

John le Carré himself is as fictional as his subcreation George Smiley. His creator, David Cornwell, hid behind the pseudonym of John le Carré for nearly 60 years. The Pigeon Tunnel hardly takes the mask off — but Errol Morris does his damnedest. He gives us a close-up look of the real David Cornwell, who speaks candidly about his upbringing by his conman father who hopped from mark to mark, living on the run, never telling the truth. Cornwell is pretty frank about this being formative to his life path. He quotes Graham Greene: “childhood is the credit balance of the writer.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t have become a journalist had my birth mother not worked for the C.I.A. Had I not grown up at the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, I wouldn’t have become a journalist. The children of spies can make better storytellers than their parents: we’re kept permanently in the dark. That core of unresolved mystery and suspense generates a lifetime of stories.

Power is a lie agreed upon. And spycraft is all about deception. Only the life of a man who wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can communicate the extent of that. What that actually says about the world is limited — Morris doesn’t interview anyone except Cornwell. But as a study of a life, or the mythology thereof, The Pigeon Tunnel is hard to fault. A perfectly fine profile.