In John le Carré's fiction, spying for or against a cause dramatises a double-edged dystopian fantasy. Regardless to which side his spies commit themselves, capitalist or liberal democracy or Communism, the ‘cause’ and those who work to achieve its goals are sacrificed to pragmatic, often brutal means. Critics have assumed that le Carré's grim Cold War spyscapes are based on his own experience in British Secret Intelligence and therefore must represent a critique of its ethically dubious policies and practices. Instead of responding directly, he refuses to discuss his own missions or the British intelligence agencies – MI5 and MI6 – for which he worked. He insists, however, that his fictional intelligence agencies and their plots and counterplots, treacheries and opportunism are purely imaginary. Nonetheless, beginning with his first novel, Call for the Dead, all his Cold War thrillers coalesce into a dystopian warning that the sacrifices demanded by political ideology erase historical memory. To countermand that erasure, his Cold War fiction dramatises the unhealed wounds of World War II suppurating in the grave ethical impact of the Cold War. A recent documentary film reveals

Le Carré's assertive repetitions of ‘I’ and impassioned language do not accord with the following interpretation of his response: ‘We only see what le Carré wanted us to see: a man who has apparently dealt with the shadows of his past with good humour and determination’ (Bailey, np).