John le Carré Made Great Art Out of Cold War Ideology
John le Carré was one of the great postwar novelists, converting the experience of Cold War espionage into brilliant works of literature. Yet he did so without really questioning the ruling doctrines of the Western camp or Britain’s role in it.
John le Carré at home in London on October 6, 1996. (David Levenson / Getty Images)
As a metaphor for the ideological conflict between capitalist West and communist East, the concept of a Cold War never made much sense in Vietnam, Korea, or Malaya, where things got distinctly hot. In reality, the Cold War was a metaphor for the West’s postwar struggle between liberalism and leftism.
In this schema, the Soviet Union served as a cipher, a chilling specter more likely to suborn the suburbs with socialism than march across the distant steppes for Stalinism. The bogeyman of an expansionist, authoritarian communism served to keep the domestic left in line, therefore, and to set limits on postwar social democracy.
The most spectacular manifestation of this was McCarthyism in the United States. It took on a more subtle form in Britain via media sniping, MI5 snooping on the British Communist Party, and spy fiction, the Cold War’s primary cultural product.
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