Great passages - Le Carré

Meet John le Carré, the espionage genre’s master storyteller. On the first page of “Smiley’s People,” Le Carré transports us to Paris: We are somewhere in a dreary quartier. It is the “boiling month of August” – the 4th, to be precise. A church bell has just chimed, just ahead of a factory bell. A “stocky woman of about fifty” (a Russian émigré? A Stalingrad survivor?) emerges from a darkened warehouse carrying a shopping bag. She sets off along the pavement to the bus-stop, “full of her usual energy and purpose.”

Le Carré picks it up from here:

“The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well-fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shuttered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight starboard list and told clearly that she was used to burdens. There was also fun in her, however. Her grey hair was gathered in a bun behind her, but there remained one sprightly forelock that flopped over her brow to the rhythm of her waddle. A hardy humour lit her brown eyes. Her mouth, set above a fighter’s chin, seemed ready, given half a reason, to smile at any time.”

As you can see, Le Carré has astounding descriptive powers. In a single passage, we learn a lot about this woman. But we hunger for more. A few paragraphs later, one is hopelessly drawn into Le Carré’s vividly painted world of espionage. And there’s no leaving it until you’ve read the last page. I first read “Smiley’s People” some 25 years ago. But the mental image of this stocky woman in black waddling along a hot Parisian street has never left me. Amazing.