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My aim in writing “Cheshire Cheese and Camembert” was to take some of the younger characters who appeared in “Blessèd are the Meek and “Twenty-six Nil” and place them in a more modern setting, ie. the early years of the 20th century. The turbulence of the period between 1913 and 1919 made for a vibrant background: the suffragette movement, the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Russian Revolution, not to mention the Great War.

Inevitably the war had the greatest impact on families like that of my narrator, Charlie Knott, but I did not want to turn my novel into a war story. Reports of events in northern France come only from newspaper reports or more graphically from letters from Charlie’s son Alfred.

As Charlie has left Hyde for work by the docks at the eastern end of the Manchester Ship Canal, the town of Hyde is less of a feature than in the previous books. However, perhaps I should have made at least a brief mention of the sacrifice Hydonian men and women made at that time. 710 men of Hyde who gave their lives are commemorated at the cenotaph on Werneth Low, a windblown hill overlooking the town and the great pattern of distant boroughs. It is one of my favourite places in the world.

Brent

JOHN LE CARRÉ: An Appreciation



What a miserable end to such a rubbish year. After all the suffering caused by the coronavirus, the restrictions on life and liberty, and the grotesque number of deaths, comes the latest: that of a literary hero, John le Carré.

2020 had already taken away two icons of my youth: the beautiful Diana Rigg and the charismatic Sean Connery. Now someone else from that generation, someone whom I discovered a year or two later, someone who also allowed me to follow my imagination into a world apart from my own.

A fan of mysteries, thrillers and spy stories, in film, on television or in print, I came across The Spy Who Came in from the Cold while searching for something a little deeper than Ian Fleming and The Man from UNCLE. At first I was daunted by the demands the writer was putting on the reader: nothing was as it seemed, there was duplicity and lying and smoke and mirrors at every turn. But how I was rewarded by the effort! It was a proper novel: entertaining, yes, but serious too, politically engaged and brilliantly written and plotted - as valid as anything I was being encouraged to read for English Literature A Level.

The BBC serialisation of Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy appeared on television at about the same time. People grumbled about it being grim and unfathomable. It was a challenge, granted, but as the plotline slowly revealed itself it became a weekly treasure of story-telling, wonderful acting and electrifying suspense. As far away from Bond as could be imagined, suddenly George Smiley was the spy we loved.

And so to the books: the rest of that majestic Karla trilogy, backtracking for the early works, then onwards, buying each one in hard back as they appeared through the eighties, nineties, into this century. Each book anticipated like a treat, a promise of a great read whatever the subject, each a delight. And each one chiming with a political world view I shared.

The more fiction I have tried to write in recent years, the more I appreciate Le Carré’s skill with a novel’s structure, its pace, the way it opens up; how it challenges the reader and yet carries him/her along at the same time. He is a master of dialogue and not only the clipped sarcasm of the English establishment. He is a master of suspense, of drama, and of pathos.

It is hard to pick a favourite. Anything with Smiley in is up there with the best. Absolute Friends is a brilliant exposé of post-Cold War relationships. And A Perfect Spy is probably his masterpiece.

Le Carré passed away as he approached his nineties. All through the last ten years I have wondered if there was one more story in him; we were rewarded with four. And now, sadly, that marvellous sequence has ended. The agent will no longer run in the field but at least we will always have those books. We can revisit them (I surely will), immerse ourselves in that pithy prose and remind ourselves of the towering figure that English writing lost yesterday.

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Cheshire Cheese and Camembert is the third and final part of what, somewhat inadvertently, has become a Hydonian trilogy. 

Loosely following on from Blessèd are the Meek and Twenty-six Nil, the story takes place during the early years of the twentieth century and much of the action has moved from Hyde to Salford, and principally around the docks at the eastern end of the Manchester Ship Canal. Walter Rowbotham's best man, Charlie Knott, now a middle-aged man with a steady job, tells the story about how he, his family and his friends come to terms with the modern world and the challenges it poses, not least the conflict that grips Europe in 1914.

There is much more about the new novel on the Books page...

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