I have been re-reading The Naive and Sentimental Lover, John Le Carre’s solitary “straight” novel, which rather flopped when it was first published in 1971, with the result that he never produced another of its kind. Yet it is an impressive book, with autobiographical features based on his relationship with his friend and fellow novelist James Kennaway and Kennaway’s wife Susan, with whom he had what appears to have been a mysterious affair around the time of the break-up of his first marriage.
The story begins somewhat gothically in an old dark house near Bath, lit only by lantern, and proceeds to a big central scene in Paris, perhaps faintly Joycean, and more than a little laboured, I thought. But the book recovers strongly in the succeeding London chapters, one of them at the Savoy Hotel, followed by a climax in the Swiss Alps.
In a way it is like an espionage novel without the spies, much of it gripping, intricate, and sometimes hilarious. It’s a long book, undeniably exasperating at times, though I was never in danger of giving up.
Kennaway, who was schooled at Glenalmond in Perthshire but whose reputation nosedived after his death in a car accident at the age of forty, plays a star role in the book.
As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I once interviewed him in his study in his London home near the Thames embankment, but the subject of his private life - about which I knew little at the time - never came up. I knew and admired him simply as the author of the brilliant army novel Tunes of Glory and other early successes, though his illuminating final novel, Silence, preceded by Some Gorgeous Accident, were still to come. He was an inspired screen writer, whose death - seemingly of a heart attack - took place when he was driving to his country home in Gloucestershire.
His wife Susan, in the 1980s, wrote what was evidently a fascinating memoir of him, which Allan Massie reviewed in the London Review of Books and which (having tracked it down on Amazon) I am now about to read. Happily his qualities as a novelist are showing signs of rediscovery. Thanks to Le Carre, I cannot wait to renew my acquaintance with this maverick novelist. The London Review of Books, by the way, has just placed its massive archive on line for six months. This, along with the next dozen printed copies of the magazine itself, seems a snip at £12.
3 May 2015.
The story begins somewhat gothically in an old dark house near Bath, lit only by lantern, and proceeds to a big central scene in Paris, perhaps faintly Joycean, and more than a little laboured, I thought. But the book recovers strongly in the succeeding London chapters, one of them at the Savoy Hotel, followed by a climax in the Swiss Alps.
In a way it is like an espionage novel without the spies, much of it gripping, intricate, and sometimes hilarious. It’s a long book, undeniably exasperating at times, though I was never in danger of giving up.
Kennaway, who was schooled at Glenalmond in Perthshire but whose reputation nosedived after his death in a car accident at the age of forty, plays a star role in the book.
As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I once interviewed him in his study in his London home near the Thames embankment, but the subject of his private life - about which I knew little at the time - never came up. I knew and admired him simply as the author of the brilliant army novel Tunes of Glory and other early successes, though his illuminating final novel, Silence, preceded by Some Gorgeous Accident, were still to come. He was an inspired screen writer, whose death - seemingly of a heart attack - took place when he was driving to his country home in Gloucestershire.
His wife Susan, in the 1980s, wrote what was evidently a fascinating memoir of him, which Allan Massie reviewed in the London Review of Books and which (having tracked it down on Amazon) I am now about to read. Happily his qualities as a novelist are showing signs of rediscovery. Thanks to Le Carre, I cannot wait to renew my acquaintance with this maverick novelist. The London Review of Books, by the way, has just placed its massive archive on line for six months. This, along with the next dozen printed copies of the magazine itself, seems a snip at £12.
3 May 2015.
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