Gotham Calling

Although his work had little to do with Batman comics, John le Carré was a foundational writer for some of the other stuff I cover in this blog. Between the Circus series and his other novels, he became one of my all-time favorite authors. Thank you for filling my head with spies, cold wars, doomed lovers, broken dreams, political intrigue, and hauntingly stirring prose…

“There are deaths we unconsciously prepare for, depending on our choice of trades. An undertaker contemplates his funeral, the rich man his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence. An actor’s greatest terror, I am told, is to watch the theatre empty itself while he wrestles in a void for his lines, and what else is that but a premature vision of his dying? For the civil servant, it is the moment when his protective walls of privilege collapse around him and he finds himself no safer than the next man, exposed to the gaze of the overt world, answering like a lying husband for his laxities and evasions. And most of my intelligence colleagues, if I am honest, came into this category: their greatest fear was to wake up one morning to read their real names en clair in the newspapers; to hear themselves spoken of on the radio and television, joked and laughed about and, worse yet, questioned by the public they believed they served.”

(in The Secret Pilgrim)