John le Carre · 1986 · exile

John le Carre's 1986 novel, the most autobiographical thing he wrote. A senior British intelligence officer disappears after his father's funeral and holes up in a seaside boarding house to write the story of his life - a childhood with a magnificent confidence-trickster father, a friendship in Bern, and thirty years of belonging to two services at once.

1. 1
   Bern

   Sent to Switzerland as a student, Magnus Pym meets Axel, a Czech refugee who becomes the closest friend of his life - and, in time, his handler, in a relationship neither of them ever manages to end.

2. 2
   Vienna

   Postings across Cold War Europe follow, and Pym becomes exactly what both his services want: charming, plausible, endlessly accommodating - a man assembled out of other people's requirements, which is his father's trade exactly.

3. 3
   Prague

   Behind the curtain the other half of his career is conducted, and the material flows both ways for decades - protected on each side by people who cannot afford to have been fooled for as long as they have been.

4. 4
   Washington

   By the time the Americans start asking why the take from Pym's networks looks so convenient, he is a senior officer in Vienna and his father has just died - and the two events together finish him.

5. 5
   Devon

   He vanishes to a boarding house on the Devon coast with a tin box of papers and writes it all down for his son - and the whole novel is that document, produced by a man who has decided how the thing ends.