STOOD SIDE BY SIDE THESE TWO BOOKS look like a comedy double act. At 820-plus pages long, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming is an Oliver Hardy-sized volume. Adam Sisman’s The Secret Life of John le Carré, on the other hand, is thinner than Stan Laurel’s little finger. No surprises there: whereas Shakespeare offers us what his subtitle calls The Complete Man, Sisman has already given us the full SP on his man in 2015’s John le Carré: The Biography.
Alas, far from being biography, that all but authorised book turned out to be only half a life. Even as Sisman was correcting his proofs, le Carré was putting the finishing touches to. Neither book, though, got down and dirty. Sisman stopped being prim only in order to be exculpatory. Le Carré’s book was at once disarming and defensive — a smokescreen masquerading as a mirror.
