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John le Carré: Difference between revisions

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John le Carré (view source)

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* [[Anachronic Order]] : common; le Carre often goes back in time to explore the psychological development of his characters.
* [[Anti -Villain]]: The first novel in particular. {{spoiler|Two Jews who survived the Nazis, one in a concentration camp}} wind up as spies because {{spoiler|they fear another Holocaust}}.
* [[Author Avatar]] (Magnus Pym)
* [[Badass Israeli|Badass Israelis]] (a whole operational team of them in ''The Little Drummer Girl'')
* [[Based Onon a True Story]] (most of his books have at least a grain of true events in there; Smiley is thought by some to be based on SIS chief Sir Maurice Oldfield, although Le Carré himself identified author and [[MI 5]] officer John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, as Smiley's model)
* [[Batman Gambit]] (in ''The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'')
* [[Berlin Wall]] (crucial in the climactic scene of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold")
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* [[Feed the Mole]], [[Fake Defector]]... actually, most of the serious [[Espionage Tropes]] appear somewhere in Le Carre's novels.
* [[Knowledge Broker]] (Connie Sachs, an ex-spy)
* [[May -December Romance]] : VERY common in the books, with romances by Jaded spies and confused beautiful Twenty-Something women showing up in eight of his books. George Smiley himself marries a woman twenty years his junior.
** Who cheats on him serially.
* [[Moscow Centre]] ([[Trope Namer]])
* [[No Celebrities Were Harmed]]: Le Carré uses his own made-up code names for various organisations in order to avoid revealing classified information. For example, the KGB is always referred to as "Moscow Centre" and MI-6 is referred to as "The Circus" because its headquarters is on Cambridge Circus (in reality, it wasn't).
* [[Retcon]]: Smiley loses about a decade or so off his age between ''Call for the Dead'' and ''Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.''
* [[Ripped Fromfrom the Headlines]] : Several of his books have come out in advance of the headlines from which they were ripped. A few months after ''Single & Single'' was released, there was a minor scandal involving Citibank laundering money for Russian Mobsters. Le Carré's submitted his manuscript for ''Our Game'', a book about a civil war breaking out in the Caucasus, about three months before the rekindling of war in Chechnya. And ''The Constant Gardiner'' came out just as the New York Times published a series on the misdeeds of pharmaceutical companies in Africa.
* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]] (quite cynical.)
* [[A Small Town in Germany]] ([[Trope Namer]])
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[[Category:Authors]]
[[Category:John Le Carre]]
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