As we lay upon the slab last week, biting down on the leather strap and waiting for the sawbones to whip out the furious appendix, we thought two things:

1. Why ‘The Whittington’? God forbid, will the future force poor invalids to be carved up in a hospice called ‘The Livingstone’?
2. And yes, yes, I shall turn again.

Turn again to London, to South London (gesundheit), to the old ancestral pile, to recuperate in the June sunshine, with the parakeets chirruping in the pear tree and Test Match Special drifting gently from the potting shed. And what better companion in our malingering than le Carré, so timely plucked from the oak-panelled library, with its oft-beaten generations of STMLs gazing sternly down from dust-shadow’d walls? Etc.

Having originally thought The Constant Gardener to be some kind of pre-posthumous paean to the country garden, we were pleasantly surprised by the Ralph Fiennes/Rachel Weisz version, which placed the operations of big pharma within the context of global geopolitics, and even more impressed by the Bond-gone-bad movie adaptation of The Tailor of Panama, which chronicles the possible fallout of intelligence sources gone bad. The idea of one dodgy source misdirecting the offensive capacities of the entire Western world rings true from Osama bin Laden to Hussein Chalabi to Mohammed Abdul Kahar, proving that le Carré has lost none of his bite and is due for re-reading.

A Perfect Spy is an obvious candidate for such an approach: praised by Philip Roth in The Observer as ‘The best English novel since the war’ (1986, btw), acclaimed by the New York Times as the work of ’the perfect spy novelist’, it chronicles, in Dickensian detail, the life of Magnus Pym, potential defector, and his father Rickie: conman, raconteur, bon vivant. Scenes reminiscent of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow hinterland - châteaus under occupation; black stocks of fruit and booze; trade in women and scraps of intelligence – alternate with mittel-Europe at the height of the Cold War: drab colours, colourful sex lives, bursts of encrypted traffic satellite-bursted from the roofs of snowclad embassies. We devoured it in a weekend – although we had the benefits of the bathchair and the parasol.

Are these books read now? What is the purpose of le Carré’s pre-Glasnost thrillers – except to show up the hideous idiocies of genre classification? A Perfect Spy, A Small Town in Germany, the Smiley books, all read now as deep, incisive critiques of men and women at the edge of their beliefs and their identities; the backgrounds against which they operate fade into obscurity just as the lakeland or maritime backdrops of nineteenth century novels seem irrelevant to us compared to their interior dramas. We don’t read them, as they were originally read, for insights into the realities of our time; nor do we read them now, like Fleming or Forsyth, for nostalgic thrills; we, and they, have transcended such political concerns.

That said, of course, le Carré’s own motives may not be so sure: his own MI6 career was destroyed by Kim Philby’s defection, which provided the central narrative for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A Perfect Spy is, apparently, his most autobiographical work: the character of Rick Pym refracted through that of Richard Cornwell, le Carré’s father, “an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values” (Lynn Dianne Been, John le Carré).

Excuse us. Morphine has clouded our judgement. We do not need to cheerlead such a talent. Read le Carré: for fun, read spies, for truth, read Gardener. John: don’t die; not yet.