Many of my most memorable reading experiences are conflated with incongruous settings. I first picked up Slaughterhouse-Five in Venice, on the recommendation of a fellow backpacker. I read Death in Venice, however, in Amsterdam, where the canals thinly evoked Thomas Mann’s pestilent waterways. And if you ask me about San Sebastián, the lovely Basque seaside town, I’ll flash back to the mind-blowing middle section of Cloud Atlas, which is set in postapocalyptic Hawaii. For authors, too, a place can serve as more of a catalyst than a setting. They go somewhere on holiday and end up learning something about their characters—or themselves. This is what happened to John le Carré in Corfu, and it’s why, for this week’s installment of The Atlantic’s literary-travel series, “The Writer’s Way,” Honor Jones chose to investigate le Carré’s 600-page masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, by traveling to a place that takes up only a few pages in the novel.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
“If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere,” Jones explains: “Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu.” But consider the predicament of le Carré’s protagonist, Magnus, an MI6 agent who has betrayed his country to the Communist Czechs and is lying low in Greece under cover of a family vacation. “If you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you don’t go to the obvious places,” Jones writes. “You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they’re false leads. You look where the trail is colder.”
Le Carré himself had a chance encounter in Corfu that made its way into A Perfect Spy, in a scene that opens up a central theme of the novel—the legacy of a father (Magnus’s but also le Carré’s) who was a monstrous, charismatic narcissist. It was on the Greek island that le Carré ran into a man who’d worked for his father, a globe-trotting con artist. “We was all bent, son,” the former henchman told him. “But your dad was very, very bent.”
Because great novels are rarely on the nose, le Carré sets a fictionalized version of this encounter in England. Corfu instead becomes the place where Magnus’s Czech contact, the mysterious Axel, tries to entice the Brit to join him behind the Iron Curtain. The island, for centuries beset by repeated invasions and then an onslaught of tourism, holds broader thematic significance for Jones: “Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.”
As it happens, I’m going to stop in Bern next week on a European rail vacation. The Swiss city takes up many more pages in A Perfect Spy than Corfu does; it’s where Magnus, as a very young man, first meets Axel. But I’ve already read the novel, so I’ll pack a different one. Inspired by The Atlantic’s new list of staffers’ recommendations for must-read books, I’m going to finally dig into Hernan Diaz’s Trust, which is set primarily in New York. So although I’ll be in Europe, I’ll probably be thinking of home.
