Photographs by Alice Zoo
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 handbag 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, lighting 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.
[Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris]
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.”
Corfu is where their journey begins. For centuries the island was a playground for spies, a place torn between great powers, where minor officials could go to make a name for themselves or jaded expats could try to fashion new lives. But if you’re trying to escape the past, it’s the wrong place to go.
Over the span of a generation, beginning at the turn of the 19th century, Corfu tumbled through the hands of four great powers. Walk into the city’s Old Fortress and you’ll meet a winged lion of Venice, whose face was hammered off by the Napoleonic French. On the ground is a paving stone where a Russian soldier carved his name. Prince Philip was baptized here, in the fortress’s Church of St. George. Nearly 2,000 Jews were held here, before deportation to Birkenau. Across the water: Albania. My tour guide, Andreas Grammenos, tells me about a defector who swam the channel to escape the Communist dictatorship. Andreas’s father served in Corfu’s Coast Guard, and still has the pool float the man used to get across. The fortress’s clock tower kept time until 2003, when the last technician who knew how to fix it retired.
The clock tower of the Old Fortress in Corfu (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
It was the British who brought cricket here, Magnus tells Tom. “Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.” Their holiday is all late lunches, amorous siestas, tennis lessons for Tom, and, for restless Magnus, long evening walks. Until, one day, Axel tracks him down on the cricket pitch to warn him. “It’s over,” he says. “Come with me.” He means disappear, defect. The double agent has to pick a side, or at least admit that the game is over.
Magnus refuses to hear it. He spins lies, hauling his family to one island after another: “Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, old chap. But this place is too damned idyllic.” Tom knows something, though. He has seen this “mystery man at cricket,” he tells his mother—a “wise, stringy man with a sad moustache like a conjuror’s.” They went “round and round the ground together with the thin man going slowly like an invalid.” He was kind to Magnus. He was “like a father.”
John le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell, and his father, Ronnie, was a con man and a criminal. In 1977, David took his family—his first wife, Ann, and their three boys—to Corfu on vacation. Adam Sisman tells the story in John le Carré: The Biography:
Sitting outside at an open-air beach restaurant David overheard a familiar voice talking at a nearby table.
“Reg?” he asked tentatively.
“What if I am?”
“It’s David.”
The suspicious glare melted. “Ronnie’s boy!”
Reg was one of Ronnie’s loyal hangers-on, a cast of courtiers that included innocent marks and faithful henchmen and a rotating roster of replacement mothers for young le Carré. Reg told le Carré that he and others had taken the rap for some of Ronnie’s crimes, and served time in prison for them. “We was all bent, son,” Reg said. “But your dad was very, very bent.”
That scene from Corfu turns up in A Perfect Spy, though Reg is replaced by a character named Syd Lemon, who drops these lines back in England. Syd is speaking with Magnus’s MI6 boss, who is trying to find him before the Czechs, or Magnus’s own despair, catch up to him. In the novel, Magnus’s father is called Rick. “I did time” for Rick, Syd says. “A lot of us did.” Rick “was bent, you see. We was all bent.” But Rick “was very bent indeed.”
Le Carré tried, and felt he failed, for 25 years to write about his father, before he found, with A Perfect Spy, that he could lay the story of life with Ronnie over the armature of an espionage thriller. The book begins with Magnus on the run, heading for the hiding place of his own imagination, a guest room by the sea. The story slips between past and present while the narration slips from first person to third and back again, sometimes from sentence to sentence, which is entirely natural, because we’re not the people we used to be. Magnus’s childhood—the missing mother; the boarding schools; the weepy, groping hugs from Rick—is every bit as harrowing as being hunted by the East and West at once.
Le Carré wrote 26 novels before he died, in 2020. He traveled to research many of them. Everywhere he went, he dreaded meeting victims of his father’s schemes. Ronnie showed up in Cairo and Beirut—trying, maybe, to get into the gun-running business—then in Singapore, where he was arrested; then in Hong Kong, where he was arrested again. Now a letter came: Ronnie was in Delhi, claiming that he’d been appointed a maharaja’s right-hand man and asking his son for £1,000.
The seductive power of this guy! This is a man who wooed his own prosecutor. After a conviction for fraud, Ronnie wrote admiring letters from prison to the man who had argued against his appeal. Upon his release, Sisman writes, the prosecutor came to stay with Ronnie, who introduced him to “obliging young ladies.” Decades later, in Hong Kong, where le Carré went to research the novel that became The Honourable Schoolboy, he ran into the policeman who had overseen Ronnie’s imprisonment there: “Mr. Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I have ever met,” he told le Carré. “When I get back to London, he’s going to set me up in business.” You couldn’t touch him without being corrupted by him.
When Ronnie died, le Carré may have thought himself liberated. The feeling lasted for about five minutes. At the beginning of A Perfect Spy, the phone rings, announcing the death of Magnus’s father: “I’m free,” Magnus says. But even after death, Rick keeps turning up. Very near the end, A Perfect Spy is addressed to his ghost.
Once, a woman contacted le Carré. He had no idea who she was, but she seemed to believe that they’d had sex on a train. Of course, Sisman writes, it had been Ronnie, “passing himself off as the world-famous author.” The first person, the second, the third; fact, fiction, death—they were no match for Ronnie Cornwell.
One day in Corfu, I catch a cricket match played by a group of veterans. A man asks me something in Greek, then switches to English: He’s wondering if I can explain the rules to his son. I’ve been writing in a notebook—maybe he thought I was some kind of official, keeping score, when what I’m actually writing is that I’ve never seen so many older gentlemen taking their shirts off in public. They thwack the ball into the parking lot, and I imagine le Carré pretending to watch while dreading, always, the possibility of his father appearing in the crowd.
A narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
Just as Corfu isn’t the first place you’d look for John le Carré, I’m probably not the first person you’d expect to write about him. A Perfect Spy was published in 1986, the year I was born. Also, I’m a woman. One of the complaints against le Carré was that he couldn’t write female characters. They tended to be beautiful and faithless, always running off, one critic wrote, “with another male, like a cat.” Anyway, I don’t care about that. I don’t really care about the women or lack of women in the 25 other novels, either.
The character I identify with is Magnus—with his compulsive adoption of other people’s values, with the way he puts on an identity only to cast it aside, with his damage and delusion, with his ravenous need to be loved. Everywhere he goes, Magnus compiles pieces of Magnus: from Ronnie’s retinue; from the fancy boys at boarding school and the Oxford socialists he spies on; from Axel; from Jack Brotherhood, his mentor at MI6. “Magnus is a great imitator,” Axel tells Mary. “I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”
[Read: John le Carré knew England’s secrets]
At the risk of turning an island full of real people into a handy literary metaphor: Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.
Corfu emerged from the churn of ancient and colonial history only to plunge into devastating world wars—as many as one in 20 Greeks died during World War II from violence or famine—and then into a brutal civil war, and then into a tourism boom. Today, about a quarter of its inhabitants were born abroad. And yet Andreas’s family has lived here for eight generations. He can find, in the archives stored in the Old Fortress, letters from his ancestors haggling over the price of wine. When he was growing up, you didn’t need a ticket to enter the fortress, and he and his friends used to play there, daring one another to run through the tunnels, the children’s footsteps echoing off the ancient walls.
Andreas takes me and Alice, the photographer I’m traveling with, from the fortress through the city. The houses aren’t the blue and white of the Greek flag. Instead (thanks to the Venetians) they’re sherbet-colored—cream and butter yellow, pink, apricot, and peach. The cafés on the avenue near the cricket pitch are busy, but whole grids of empty tables remain roped off. It’s April, and one feels already the dull tread of the approaching summer crowds. Andreas says that as late as the 1950s, it would have been “unthinkable” for an average villager to come here for coffee—only the elite were welcome. Tourism changed that. One night, a restaurant is playing “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts.”
Today Corfu is one of the most densely populated World Heritage Sites in Europe. Andreas says the local government is involved in a contentious debate about air conditioners: Can they be rigged up outside people’s homes, or are they a desecration of the scenic past? It’s hot here in the summer. Personally, I don’t think tourists should even be allowed to see this place if they’re going to go around complaining about AC units ruining their view.
Tourists and locals agree that the most important thing to do in Corfu is visit Saint Spyridon. Spyridon was a shepherd in Cyprus who became a bishop, went to the Council of Nicaea, performed miracles, and (after he died and was disinterred and embalmed) traveled through the mountains from Constantinople to Greece in a sack on the back of a mule.
Outside his church, people buy candles to light: The bigger the prayer, the bigger the candle. Inside is his body. Each morning, Spyridon’s slippered feet are revealed so that people can kiss them, but it’s the afternoon now, so the line to get into the crypt isn’t too long. Above his casket dangle dozens of silver thuribles, and from the silver thuribles, silver tamata—plaques engraved with the images of answered prayers (a baby, a heart)—and little silver ships, the symbol of Corfu. The church’s altar stands behind an iconostasis, a wall of icons and paintings. Andreas says this is a common feature of Greek Orthodox churches because his countrymen “love mystery”—because they understand the power of the hidden, the unseen.
Corfu was never a center of diplomatic activity, but it was a hub of information, where facts were dug up and traded like the metals and minerals of other lands. Aggelis Zarokostas, a historian at Utrecht University who is writing a book about 18th- and 19th-century espionage in mainland Greece and the Ionian Islands, told me the story of an agent named for the saint. Spiridon Foresti was a British consul who kept filing dispatches even after the French put him under house arrest for a year. He must have dropped his reports out his windows; how he was able to gather the information while locked inside, no one knows.
A woman lights candles outside the Holy Church of Saint Spyridon. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
British rule in Corfu lasted from 1815 to 1864. The English argued that they were bringing law and order to a cutthroat land. Immediately after they arrived, a plague broke out. Officials, going door-to-door gathering information about the ill and their contacts, dragged priests along with them to threaten people with excommunication if they didn’t comply.
Long after Corfu was turned over to the Greeks, traces of the English remained, as did many expats. The most famous were the Durrells, who moved to Corfu in 1935. There’s a popular British TV show about them: The Durrells, which begins with a broke and plucky widow ditching England to bring her four obstreperous children here. Two of those children grew up to be authors—Gerald, the famous nature writer, and Lawrence, the novelist.
I brought with me a copy of Lawrence’s memoir of life on the island, Prospero’s Cell. Published in 1945, it’s full of lush writing about the landscape: “The olives are tacking madly from grey to silver”; the “cypresses are like drawn bows.” But he can be nasty about the “natives.” He describes the hands and feet of peasants as “blunt and hideous: mere spades grown upon the members through a long battle with soil, ropes, and wood.” After reading that, I feel a little less good about the fact that my hotel room is called the Durrell suite. There’s a bust of Lawrence outside the Old Fortress. Andreas says people think that he was a spy too.
Alice and I have gone back to the fortress to visit the library housed in the British garrison, where the manager lets us touch a 16th-century edition of The Iliad. As we’re leaving, some teenagers on a field trip mark us out as English (Alice is English but, for the record, I’m American—and this is the one and only time I have ever imagined that this fact could be a defense against anything). They mock us, mercilessly. To be fair, all they do is say “Hello,” but they draw out the greeting in a way that makes clear what a totally preposterous word hello is. “Hellooo,” they keep saying, waving and laughing at us.
The public library in Corfu is located inside the Old Fortress. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
We hustle away with our heads down and continue on to the two main sites of British memory in Corfu: the British Cemetery and the estate of Mon Repos.
The cemetery is a disheveled green dreamscape. Just inside is an ancient stone lawn roller, more sculpture now than tool. For a little while, I pulled it, creaking, through the long grasses. Farther in, we find the graves. There are the ancient ones of midshipmen and babies, the graves of British soldiers from both world wars, and then, from more recent years, plaques for the expats: Barbara Anne Reason (BORN IN OXFORD, ENGLAND—FOREVER IN CORFU), Gladys Fish (RESTING IN CORFU: A PLACE SO LOVED), and Adda Dendrinou:
BORN KARACHI 1941
DIED CORFU 1995
TRUE CORFIOTE SHE LOVED ENGLAND
The Mon Repos estate was built in 1828 for the British lord high commissioner, and a century later, Prince Philip was born on a tabletop inside. I would like to see the table, but the shutters of the mansion are sealed tight. (Anyway, it turns out the table is long gone—sold to a shipping company for the boardroom of its London office.) You can find Roman retaining walls on the grounds here, and debris from a temple to Hera. In the back of the derelict garden is a row of metal arches driven into the ground like a giant’s croquet hoops. They were covered in wisteria once, but the shade must have shifted as the trees grew taller. The plant didn’t die though; it just reared up and threw itself toward the sun, kudzuing over the nearby treetops. I lie there, breathing in the sweet, woozy smell of wild wisteria.
At the bottom of the estate, Alice and I step off a jetty and swim out into the cold, blue sea. By this point, I totally get Gladys Fish: I’m ready to live and die here too.
Wisteria drapes over trees in the now-derelict garden of the Mon Repos estate. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
I’m not supposed to be swimming and smelling flowers; I’m supposed to be doing John le Carré things: walking on cliff tops muttering to myself, checking dead-letter drops, sweet-talking my agents in the field. I keep looking for men in dark raincoats, but it doesn’t rain and my sole candidate for either surveillance or countersurveillance remains my lady with the handbag.
Le Carré was only ever a minor spy, and he quit the service the minute he could afford to. After the publication of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in 1963, his family lived abroad to lower their tax bill. Some of that time was spent in Greece, on Crete. Le Carré was miserable there. He wrote long letters to the wife of a colleague and flew back and forth to Paris, London, and New York, where he was suddenly famous. When he was on Crete, his wife, Ann, nagged him about visiting the island’s historic sites. “I hate ruins,” he wrote to a friend. He took so many walks and made so many long-distance phone calls that, Sisman writes, “a local official accused him of spying for the Turks and asked for a bribe as the price of his silence.”
[Read: The double life of John le Carré]
At one point, a Czech writer, or someone posing as a Czech writer, came to Crete and kept asking him to meet. Le Carré was nervous enough to contact the head of the Athens station to report that Czech intelligence was trying to recruit him. In an interview with Sisman, I asked if he really believed this. His biography isn’t a study of just a fascinating man, but a fascinating liar, one who—very much like his father—spun fictions that he then struggled to distinguish from the truth. But a Czech approach, Sisman told me, seemed plausible.
Le Carré said that he was drawn to spying because he wanted to serve his country—and to do penance for Ronnie’s crimes. But he also found that secrecy could be a “place of escape,” a way of feeling “superior to life rather than engaging in it.” He “relished the notion of appearing to be someone dull, while all the time I was someone terribly exciting.”
After spying, he found other ways to escape. One was writing; another was travel. When he went abroad to research a new novel, he would go in character, pretending to be whomever he was writing about. Maybe he got the idea from a training exercise for MI6, which involved posing as a German tourist in Brighton; he kept the accent up even while being interrogated by local police.
A building undergoing renovations in Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
I had the idea that, while writing this story, I would go around pretending to be other people. I’m hopeless at accents, but I could come up with backstories: Maybe I was heading to a destination bachelorette party, or was on a soul-searching journey before pursuing IVF. My name might be Olivia, or Stef, or Gladys Fish. But getting strangers to ask me personal questions is harder than I expected, especially because I mostly want to talk with Alice, and after two days together, I’ve already told her everything that has ever happened to me. Magnus never has that problem. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth?” Mary demands. “The suggestion amused him.”
It was not until I read Sisman’s second book on the author, The Secret Life of John le Carré, which he published only after le Carré’s death, that I grasped how much of le Carré’s writing substitutes one place for another, one woman for another. In 1983, le Carré went back to Greece, this time to Lesbos. By then he’d divorced Ann and married his second wife, Jane, but he wasn’t traveling with her. He had a new mistress—Sue Dawson, half his age. In the mornings, Sisman writes, she would “lean out of bed to peer through the gaps between the old floorboards to see him working in the room below.” The book he was writing at the time was, of course, A Perfect Spy, in which Magnus’s wife, Mary, does the same thing, looking through the “gaps between the planks” to see Magnus showering in the room downstairs.
Le Carré told Dawson that she was his muse. He’d met her through her job: producing abridged books for cassette tapes. Mary’s job is to rebind old books for MI6 with secret messages hidden inside. The one book Magnus never lets her repair is his battered old copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, which purports to be the autobiography of an adventurer during the Thirty Years’ War and is considered Germany’s first literary masterpiece. Magnus won’t let Mary touch Simplicissimus because it’s the secret codebook he uses to communicate with Axel. When le Carré got home from Lesbos, his wife typed up the pages he’d written.
“Without much effort,” Sisman writes, “I was able to identify eleven women with whom he had affairs,” and “there were plenty more besides.” Sisman suggests that cheating became a replacement for espionage for le Carré, an “ersatz form of spying”—another way to live a double life.
Fish in the sea off Mon Repos (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
It’s 10 days until Good Friday, and according to Lawrence Durrell, there’s a myth here about the 10 days leading to Good Friday: Goat-legged creatures are sawing through the trunk of the tree that holds up the world. Every year, they’ve almost cut through it when they hear the shout of “Christ has arisen!” and it makes them drop their saws to fly “in a chattering throng into the real world—if I may call our world that.”
Le Carré took inland walks, so Alice and I go inland too. In a little town called Nymfes, we see a waterfall: a glittering curtain down black rock, splitting into quick rivers that seem to uncannily slow down the longer you stare at them. It’s not hard to imagine nymphs living in that sparkling grove; it’s hard to imagine them not living there. I’ve never wanted to drink something so badly.
Next we head to the mountain village where we’re staying the night. We Google the directions and start driving, and then say “This can’t be right” 7,000 times. At first the road is a rustic track through olive groves. If we’re going the wrong way, we don’t mind too much; any moment now, it’s sure to loop us back onto a road. Nope. Instead we climb higher and higher, to scenic overlook after scenic overlook, each one of which is, to me, a rocky hellscape.
We drive over boulders, the car juddering from side to side, the wheels spinning in loose stones. I really hope those ominous scraping sounds are just branches gouging the rental car’s paint job and not jagged rocks tearing up the undercarriage. There are puddles too, deep-brown puddles of unknown fathoms in which the wheels will slip and the engine flood. I try to keep to the shallow edge while not, ideally, driving us straight off the cliff. Each turn is so tight that it appears to be a dead end. I crawl to a halt, crane my neck, sigh, and keep driving around a switchback so extreme, I feel like I’m driving back onto myself.
Should we have turned around? A thousand times, yes. It’s clear that no one in the history of the world has ever driven up this path. The only explanation is that we angered the nymphs and they’re leading us to our deaths and we are just completely going along with it. Alice keeps getting me to stop so that she can take photographs of how glorious everything is, while I keep checking the tires for puncture wounds. At one point, I try to Google Are nymphs dangerous, but something on the risks of dating a nymphomaniac comes up, and then my phone loses service again.
“How many kilometers left?” I ask Alice many, many times.
“Five point six,” she says. Countless white-knuckle hours later: “5.4.”
At last, we arrive in the village of Old Perithia. If only Magnus had come this way, I keep thinking, Axel never would have found him.
Corfu’s wealth used to be concentrated inland, because of the oaks and olive groves, and because it was safer from pirates there. According to the information sheet I find in my room that night, if you owned land near the water, you’d give it to your daughter, not your son. Old Perithia is a beautiful ghost town. It dates to 1357, and at times, as many as 1,200 people would have lived here. Now there are just a few tavernas, this bed and breakfast, meadows of blossoming wildflowers, and the ruins. The town was abandoned because of the tourists, who sucked all of the wealth and workers from the interior toward the coasts. But now so many tourists gather on the coasts that some tourists, wanting to get away from all the other tourists, come out here. They’re drawn by the promise that they’ll find something truer and more authentic here. To paraphrase Durrell: the real Corfu, if I may call it that.
Checking in, we ask the owner about the path we drove in on. “Were we … supposed to do that?”
She looks at us blankly. “You came from where?”
“Back there, through the farm, up the mountain.”
We explain about the waterfall. She knows about the waterfall. She doesn’t know about any path.
She points to the parking lot. On the other side of it lies the ordinary, non-enchanted asphalt road.
A view of Corfu’s Old Town at dusk (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)
Early in his career, John le Carré tried to write a literary novel that had nothing to do with spying: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It was awful. He wanted to be seen as a major writer, and resented the suggestion that he should stick to what he was good at. He resented, too, the assumption that once the Cold War ended, he’d have nothing left to write about. In the introduction to the 1993 edition of The Little Drummer Girl, he complained about people who believed his “rice-bowl was broken.” How could they not appreciate the fact that, “of my fourteen novels to date, five have had nothing whatever to do with the Cold War”?
The level of defensiveness is a little pathetic, a little endearing. As one critic put it, he had “already beaten the genre trap”—not by leaving genre behind, “but by finding unexpected room within, as in A Perfect Spy.” When Magnus goes to Greece, he isn’t just trying to get away from the Czechs and the English while enjoying a nice vacation with his family; he’s also trying to write a literary novel, one that will contain and transcend his past and reconcile the fragments of his many selves. Magnus fails to write that great work, the lines deteriorating into “ponderous aphorisms about betrayal”: “betrayal as love,” “betrayal as escape,” “betrayal as travel.” But le Carré succeeded. No one reading A Perfect Spy for the first time today is going to wonder if it’s a literary novel. What else could it possibly be?
The thing I love most about the book is how it uses time to turn self-pity into something purer. A writer, Magnus thinks, is like a king, looking “down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.” Later he repeats the idea: If only he could write, he’d be able to “look with favour on this child that was myself.” Maybe we should all be talking about our childhoods in the third person.
Le Carré’s mother walked out when he and his older brother were sleeping upstairs. They were 5 and 7. “One just couldn’t live like it,” she later said, as if that were an excuse. When he met her again as an adult, she informed him that Ronnie had infected her with syphilis when she was pregnant, and that he had been born with pus dripping out of his eyes. Ronnie abused him—hurt him in every way you could hurt a child—but Ronnie was the only parent he had.
I’m sitting in Spianada Square when I see the old woman again. I’ve been watching children play soccer, and thinking about how always, everywhere in the world, the littlest boy is grabbing the ball with his hands to steady it before he kicks. She’s wearing the same pink coat and clutching her bag, heading in the direction of the Old Fortress.
“Nothing goes away in life,” Magnus says in Athens, between one island and another. He’s been gone all night and most of the day, and Mary demands to know why. He’s crying; he kisses her hand and she feels the tears. He makes up a story about having to talk down an old Czech agent who was threatening to expose him. It’s a lie. It’s one version of the truth.
Travel Notes
Swimming off Mon Repos
Maybe you’ve been to paradise before and can yawn at crystal-clear waters, but I’ve swum only off America’s East Coast, where the ocean is mostly the color of strong tea, which is a nice way of saying the color of dirt. Normally I’d be appalled if my leg touched slimy fish, but when you can see them, it’s totally different. I like the delicate fish, quick and bright as sunbeams. Floating in the water, you feel outside of time, as if this could be any century. Hera’s worshippers might be carting their stones over the hilltop, or British soldiers could be galloping by—a “flash of red hunting coats through the olive-groves,” as Lawrence Durrell describes their trace on the landscape. But I can’t stay in the water long. My arms are ice, and my chest is hot. “It’s your heart,” Alice says. A more organized traveler would have brought a towel, but lying dripping on the sun-warmed rock is better.
Analipsi 7, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece
Lunch at Pergola
This restaurant is in Corfu’s Jewish quarter. The area was heavily bombed by the Nazis, and you can still see the gaps where buildings were destroyed. It makes you think about how full of history an empty space can be. Some ruins still stand, flowers growing through the blasted window frames. At the restaurant, we sit outside and order bread and salad and giant beans (that’s what they’re called: giant beans). A patchwork array of stray cats sit on their haunches, watching every bite we eat.
Ag. Sofias 15, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece
Kissing Saint Spyridon’s casket
The casket is small, though it holds another, smaller casket inside it. The inner one has a removable bottom for slipper access, because each morning, worshippers come to kiss the saint’s feet. About once a year, the slippers are replaced with new ones. The idea is that he wears them out by walking around at night performing miracles—or maybe it’s all the kissing. When I’m there, we can’t get at the saint’s feet, so the women around me press their lips to the casket instead. There’s a faint odor, and when it’s my turn to bend down, I realize, to my shame, that instead of kissing the casket, I’m sniffing it. But the smell isn’t coming from the saint. It’s coming from us: the crowding people, the smell not of death but of life. Outside the crypt, a priest is blessing a baby in a blue onesie. While the pious wait in line for the saint, another baby waits in line for the priest.
Agiou Spiridonos 32, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece
Treats
If you go to Corfu, I recommend eating lots of things—salty and sweet things, but especially sweet things—enfolded in pastry. Here’s a fun word: galaktoboureko. It’s custard under phyllo dough, with sweet syrup poured on top, and we have the best version at Periklis Alexis. The back of the bakery is decorated, inexplicably, with framed photos of fighter jets from sometime in the past century, deadly silver in blue skies. I have a feeling that le Carré would have appreciated that—some menace to cut the sweetness.
Agiou Vasileiou 12, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece
The Merchant’s House in Old Perithia
Here you can sleep in a cozy suite knowing that you’re snuggled in a valley of spring wildflowers and ghosts. A printout in my room says that after Old Perithia was deserted, “nature decided to reclaim the land, and in doing so she enveloped the village.” I like this part: The creeping roots of orchids, asparagus, oregano, and wild mint “either protected many old buildings and churches, or sped up their ruination.” The village is abandoned except for the inn and a handful of taverns for day-trippers. We’re there on the very first day of the season, so I think we get special treatment, but the food is delicious and the owner gives us big slices of walnut cake for free. We linger until he has to ask us to leave, because his wife is late for physical therapy, and the appointment is probably a long way from Old Perithia.
Old Perithia, Kerkyra 49081, Greece
Kanoni Beach
In Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell writes about “perhaps the loveliest beach in the world. Its name is Myrtiotissa.” Of course we go there. Nudist Only is spelled out in white pebbles at the top of the path. At the bottom is a tangled heap of discarded beach umbrellas, the metal rusting, the sunshades in tatters. Accustomed by then to the baseline beauty available anywhere you look, we decide the view is just okay. “I’ve seen better beaches in England,” Alice says. But after a few days of searching, we find what is actually the loveliest beach in the world, or at least the loveliest beach on one April day in Corfu. It’s in the northeast, below a green spit of land lifted high over the sea. In fact, there’s a perfect beach on every side of the outcrop, but my favorite is this one, Kanoni. It was too cold to swim, or I’d still be there, diving off the rocks. Someday I want to go back and swim around the outcrop, stopping off at each side. Maybe I loved it so much because even while I was there, I was dreaming of returning.
Kassiopi 491 00, Greece
Plous Books & Coffee
Corfu has plenty of tourist traps, long lanes lined with generic shops selling honey, body lotion made from donkey milk and olive oil, evil-deflecting blue-glass eyes, and—for some reason—tote bags with Frida Kahlo’s face on them, as if they ordered all of their products from the same conglomerate’s catalog. But this bookstore is quirky and sweet, with shabby damask chairs in a dimly lit back room where you can sit and drink coffee and read. I get a copy of The Dead, by James Joyce, in Greek. Notably: I can’t find any books by John le Carré.
Nikiforou Theotoki 91, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece
This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Chasing le Carré in Corfu.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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