Chasing le Carré in Corfu

If you're trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found, you don't go to the obvious places.

- By Honor Jones

Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her hand- bag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead. I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, light- ing a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there's nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.

I think A Perfect Spy is a nearly perfect book. Only a few of its more than 600 pages are actually about Corfu. If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere: Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu. But as Axel would tell you, if you're trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found, you don't go to the obvious places. You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they're false leads. You look where the trail is colder.

Magnus is an MI6 agent who has betrayed England by spying for the Czechs, but now the Americans are onto him. In a frenzy of denial, he drags his wife, Mary, and son, Tom, on a frantic Greek holiday: Lesbos, Athens, Hydra, Spetses. The Pyms change “boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others.”