John le Carre, Ian Fleming and Joseph Heller

Ian Fleming was a fantasist of England in the post-war period: Carre is no realist. He is a novelist of small defeats and large disillusions, a novelist, in other words, of the period we are living in. (I'm almost tempted to say he is the first novelist of the Cold War and in his novel he has read the Cold War in the light of World War Two - which is, incidentally, a more sensible undertaking than Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which represented World War Two as if it were already the Cold War.)