Michael Brissenden joined his father on a trip through the Balkans to research a novel on organised crime. It led to John le Carré ... and a missed opportunity.
Every life has some important landmarks, most of them are anticipated – getting married, having children, significant birthdays like turning 21 or 50 – or paying witness to the end of the Cold War and passing up the opportunity meet John le Carré, one of the greatest chroniclers of the era. But more on that later.
Like many father-son relationships ours had had its ups and downs, its shared joys and misunderstandings. Fathers and sons are often not that good at talking – often better at doing. This was a way to share a task, to work together and through that maybe to find a way to reach something else.Before he turned his hand to fiction, Bob was first and foremost a poet and an academic. He had a lot of friends and contacts, and he was good at making new ones.
Years later I would go back to these places as a correspondent when much of that hope and passion had turned to rubble and pain. For the moment, though, I had a plan. At the end of every day, we’d sit with a drink or two and I would ask my father about his life. I had a little dictaphone to record our conversations but beyond that, I had no real idea what I would do with any of it. I still don’t, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to them since they were recorded.
As we travelled, Dad read. He was always reading. He was a specialist in highbrow literature – the 18th century poets like Keats, Byron and Shelley – but he also loved reading crime and thrillers and in the last years of his life, that’s what he decided to write. I really don’t know how he knew John le Carré, but whatever the case David Cornwell was one of the friends he felt moved to go and see. Would I like to join him he asked?Keenly aware of his often reprised Johnson quote, I thought I could better use my time in London by getting a good hold of it. So I declined. I put my father in a taxi and sent him off to Hampstead.
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