The Pigeon Tunnel opens with a vivid recollection by David John Moore Cornwell, aka John le Carré, of birds bred for slaughter in the casinos of Monte Carlo. As a youngster visiting France with his con man father, Ronnie, David recalls a shooting range on the top of a cliff. Beneath the grass was a tunnel from which trapped pigeons escaped over the sea as targets. Rich men were waiting to shoot them.
It’s an image that sits neatly within his literary milieu of stacked games and bad actors. It’s also the title of his 2016 memoir and the working title of every novel he ever wrote. “I’ve lived through a world of endless betrayal,” he tells the great documentarian Errol Morris in this wide-ranging profile.
These two seasoned interrogators size each other up in Cornwell’s final testament on camera. He died, aged 89, in 2020, shortly after filming was completed.
Morris is the canny filmmaker who has variously coaxed confessions from Robert McNamara (The Fog of War), Lynndie England (Standard Operating Procedure) and Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known).
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Cornwell has studied his inquisitor: “Sometimes you’re a spectral figure, sometimes you’re God, and sometimes you’re present”, observes the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
From the offset, the subject foregrounds his own artifice. All interviews are “performance art”, he insists; noting his entire persona was crafted and practised over eight decades, following his father’s instructions to learn “the manners and attitude of a class to which [he] did not belong” at Sherborne School. His abandonment by his mother, his often dangerous youthful participation in his father’s many schemes, and other deprivations are shrugged off as “terribly exciting”.
His account of Ronnie, although familiar to hardcore fans, is elegantly related. His years in British intelligence; the defection of Kim Philby; and the terrible realisation that, after the second World War, West Germany would be governed by the Nazis the Allies had fought inspired a successful writing career and a series of profound correctives to the James Bond franchise.
The late octogenarian insists that he can’t help the people who “want to unmask me” and that he won’t be discussing his sex life. (His off-limits serial affairs are outlined in considerable detail in Adam Sisman’s recent book The Secret Life of John le Carré.)
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Morris plays along, but his visuals – shadowy rooms, obfuscated photographs, carefully filleted scenes from adaptations of the novelist’s work – hint that this isn’t the whole story. Check, if not mate, in a gallant match.
The Pigeon Tunnel is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ from Friday, October 20th
