The wrong side won: Remembering John le Carré

The wrong side won: Remembering John le Carré Adrian Scottow/Flickr This ambiguous conclusion is attributed to le Carré’s favourite character, George Smiley, in his novel The Secret Pilgrim, but it is an unmistakable theme of most of le Carré’s post-Cold War novels. Le Carré’s death this week came after decades of disillusionment with the new world order and his increasing disenchantment with the behaviour of the Cold War’s victors. Not that le Carré was rooting for the Soviet bloc – “the right side lost”, after all – but he became convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the associated demise of anti-communism, left the West without a coherent ideology.