LE CARRÉ, John.

£55,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

"The Looking Glass War", corrected typescript. An exceptional working draft typescript for le Carré's fourth novel, with corrections, revisions, and additions in the author's hand to 205 pages. The typescript likely represents le Carré's final corrections to the text before it was sent to the printer. Significant pre-publication material for le Carré's novels is rare on the market; most of his papers are held at the Bodleian.Le Carré's revisions range from changes to spelling and punctuation to the addition of entire paragraphs, which emphasize the novel's satire of government bureaucracy in British intelligence agencies, in response to the public's romanticization of his previous novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). His substantive revisions accentuate the novel's bleak, dispassionate tone. In one stark example, when describing the death of a character after being hit by a car, le Carré adds that it was "quite possible that the driver was unaware of what he had done; that the impact of the body on the car was not to be distinguished from a thud of loose snow against the axle" (p. 20). Another character's drinking becomes "an expression of despair" (p. 87), and le Carré makes several changes to the dissatisfied character Leclerc, a former army commander-turned-bureaucrat, who is made to speak "indignantly" (p. 29) and "with impish piety" (p. 102), and ask questions "his mind elsewhere" (p. 132). His other changes develop the novel's aloof style. During a heated ex

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