The Independent ran an article quoting the author as such. It's a pretty interesting read.
John Le Carré said yesterday that he could no longer see a place for the "optimistic novel" as he spoke of his "despair" at a world run by American neo-conservatives.
In a forthright radio interview, the author said his latest work, Absolute Friends, a fierce polemic of American foreign policy, had been written with a "mixture of anger and impatience" about the state of global politics.
Le Carré was asked by the interviewer, James Naughtie, if it was still possible to write "optimistic fiction" in the current political climate.
The author said: "For my part, I don't think it is possible, no. I'm quite sure when I set out to write this book I wanted to entertain people, for them to have a good time, a good laugh here and there but I wanted to confront them with things that are not easily confronted outside fiction. I cannot deny that I was driven by a mixture of anger or impatience if you like and a growing despair about the way things are unfolding."
Le Carré's comments were met with a mixture of denial and endorsement yesterday by other writers and publishing industry experts. The novelist Will Self, author of Great Apes, said that unless writers were dealing with isolated success stories such as dotcom millionaires, the times did not lend themselves to optimism.
Le Carre's not an American and his views on Bush have never been positive. Still, I've met a number of conservative political types who do enjoy his novels. He's certainly a natural step up from that subliterate neocon-rimmer Tom Clancy. So maybe this will have some effect. At the very least, it's an interesting indicator of how the rest of the world feels about us.