Spectator Books of the Year: John le Carré examines his own life

Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, hired me as guide for his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to research The Mission Song. Evenings were spent on the terrace of the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu, ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of Scotch. It was easily the most entertaining ten days of my life, despite the stonking hangovers. Cornwell proved to be a thespian manqué. The wry, extremely funny anecdotes about his career as diplomat, spy and writer, his charming conman father, his peripatetic childhood and his encounters with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Richard Burton and Rupert Murdoch were all gloriously enriched by the fact that he can do all the voices. Not approximately — it’s pitch perfect. Reading The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (Viking, £20) felt like being back on that terrace. I savoured the gravelly, quietly insistent voice of a master storyteller examining his own life.

Another highlight of the year was a new biography of Africa’s most extraordinary monarch: King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (Haus Publishing, £20). Its author, Asfa-Wossen Asserate, was the emperor’s great-nephew; his nobleman father died in a coup defending the leader he no longer believed in. It’s an accessible, well-written insider’s account, and the depiction of the doomed royal court’s last days is haunting.

We Are Not Such Things by Justine Van Der Leun (Fourth Estate, £14.99) was a book I carelessly picked up but kept returning to. It’s not so much the story of the idealistic US activist Amy Biehl’s murder in the South African township of Gugulethu but about what happened next: the lies and self-delusion of both perpetrators and family and the inevitably manipulative ends to which her death was put in a nation still choking on apartheid’s legacy. Van Der Leun has a compassionate but admirably clear eye.

It was also good to see another chapter in the DRC’s tortured history probed in Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb (Hurst & Company, £25). Susan Williams unpicked the mystery of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in her previous book. This time she turns to the discovery in Shinkolobwe of the uranium eventually dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay. An intriguing, beautifully documented tale.

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