John le Carré (1931–2020)

I came late to John Le Carré, falling in love with his prose storytelling style upon my first encounter with them when, last year, I read his remarkable novel "A Legacy of Spies",

Naturally, I had to have at least one Le Carré in my Summer of Spies reading challenge this year, I picked "A Delicate Truth" because, published in 2013, it was his next most recent book and because the audiobook version that I listened to was narrated by Le Carré himself.

I found the novel very satisfying both show more because the world it describes is frighteningly plausible without ever becoming melodramatic and because the cadence of Le Carré's prose and his nuanced use of language, especially in dialogue call to something in me in the same way that the best music does.

In some ways, this is not a very dramatic tale. It covers poorly conceived, disastrously executed and robustly covered-up covert operation. The body count is low by genre standards. There are no car chases. No desperate gun battles on the streets of London. No evil genius strapping our hero to a table to be dissected by an industrial laser. Yet the import of what it describes is truly disturbing.

The tale starts slowly satisfyingly, by establishing the point of view of a mature senior Civil Servant in the FCO, pulled in over his head by an ambitious Minister, to oversee a covert operation in Gibraltar.

As I watched the stolidly upper-middle class civil servant, son of a general, married to money, well-educated but only moderately accomplished, thrill, in an appropriately low-key it-wouldn't-be-good-form-to-express-my-feelings kind of way, to the opportunity to serve his country, even if that meant obeying a bullying, egocentric, self-serving Minister, I understood that Le Carré's England is not mine or, at least, not an England I want to tolerate.

I recognise that it's real enough. It's the kind of England the odious Boris Johnson and the surprisingly dangerous Jacob Rees-Mogg want to drag us all back into so that they can live the Eton dream while the rest of us touch our forelocks and hope to keep our jobs.

It's an England where the under-funded State is preyed upon by billion dollar Private Military Corporations that are contracted to kidnap and kill with an impunity secured by anti-terror legislation that has eroded public accountability to the point of non-existence.

Le Carré describes the people of this world with great precision and insight without ever once straying into empathy. I admire that.

Nothing in the content of Le Carrè's story surprised me, a fact I find deeply depressing, but it acted as a reminder of how the clannish secrecy of an entitled ruling class mixes with the greed and egocentricity of politicians whose eyes are the revolving door into high-flying commerce to create something fundamentally corrupt.

Yet what I like most about Le Carré is the way he tells his tale. He takes his time. He uses complex sentences. He moves the reader effortlessly backwards and forwards along the timeline and he perfectly evokes a sense of place, whether it is a Cornish Fair, a Private Club or the corridors and conference rooms of the FCO.

Here's a sample of that prose from the start of Chapter Two, where we are introduced to Toby Bell, the man around whom most of the story centres. It's a slightly long extract but that is necessary to demonstrate how he evokes the man and his situation. If you like this, you'll like the book.

"On a sunny Sunday, early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British Foreign servant, earmarked for great things, sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London's Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom. Namely, recovering a tape-recording elicitly made by himself from the private office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.

His name was Tony Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him. No paymaster provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred dollar bills was waiting around the corner. No activist in a ski mask. He was, in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar, he knew nothing. Rather it was this tantalising ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.

Neither was he in appearance or by nature cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow, that his colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build. Not particularly handsome with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed. That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, State educated only child of pious artisan parents from the South coast of England who knew no politics but Labour..."
One of the joys of the book, for me, was Le Carré's narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear him read the start of Chapter One.

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George Smiley has retired from 'The Service" having turned away from intelligence work. Contemplating retirement he receives a call from Ailsa Brimley, an old wartime colleague, who is concerned that a murder is about to take place at the Carne public school in south west England. One of the schoolmaster's wive has written to Brimley claiming that her husband is plotting to kill her. Before Smiley can intervene on Brimley's behalf, the woman is murdered and he finds himself on his way to show more Carne seeking to contribute to the police investigation.
This turned out to be something very different to what I was expecting. Le Carre, Smiley- it's got to be Cold War spies, surely? No, no, no, this is a murder mystery set in a public school. So that was a surprise, but nonetheless this is a really good murder mystery. The plot is suitably thick and the denouement unexpected. The writing rich and skilful and turns something that could easily be an Agatha Christie Miss Marple novel into something of much greater quality and interest. It's of it's time (1962) and I suppose chronicles the tawdriness of the dying public school system. It's a damning indictment of what is deemed 'seemly' and the wafer thin veneer of manners and respectability that can cover up wickedness, bullying and criminality. An enjoyable read, but with the first two Smiley novels turning out to be whodunnits, I find myself wondering how the character morphs into the master spy depicted in the later iterations. show less

Even when Le Carre is at less than his best, he still laps the rest of the field! My main grouse with this is that Le Carre isn't breaking any new ground, just doing what he does so well: plunging his likeable/humble/shrewd protagonist into a situation that turns increasingly impossible and compromising, then somehow extracting him at the end, bloodied/bruised but somehow unvanquished.

In this case the protagonist is Nat, avid badminton player and experienced agent runner back from the cold show more and facing retirement - but on his way out, would he mind terribly temporarily supervising a home for washed-up assets? Except, of course, as soon as he arrives, at least one of his ponies transforms into a racehorse and before you know it we're surveilling dead drops, reinvestigating long-forgotten intelligence disasters through a new lens, and taking meetings with foreign agents. Game on!

Especially intriguing given current events is the novel's setting in time and space. The plot unfolds against a background of post-Brexit despair and trepidation about the potential consequences of Trump's presidency on the stability of the European Union. What's a patriot to do when his country is being run by "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary" and his nation's closest ally is in the hands of a Putin fanboy? A question that turns out to be as relevant today as it was back in 2018 when Le Carre was setting paper to pen.

Besides his gorgeous use of language, idiom, and metaphor, what I love about Le Carre novels are the all-too-human protagonists, simultaneously idealistic but jaded, resilient but vulnerable, honorable but flawed. Nat's a patriot but, after a career in intelligence, he's also struggling to reconcile the many hypocrisies of his chosen career field. He's brilliant at his professional responsibilities, but painfully insecure when it comes to the care and handling of the wife (liberal lawyer) and daughter (prickly hipster) he adores. His heart is pure, but not exempt from prejudices and desires (for sport, for companionship, for normalcy) that end up leading him into a situation fraught with moral and ethical implications.

The book ends somewhat abruptly: I get the sense that, once Le Carre wrote the parts that mattered to him, he simply couldn't be bothered whisking away the dishes or sweeping up crumbs. Moreover, the ending hits as a bit unrealistic (especially for Le Carre, the ultimate worldly realist), positing that an otherwise shrewd, careful operative would choose morality over duty. But such are the prerogatives of an author at the end of his career, aware that he has nothing left to prove. show less

I think this may be my favourite non-Karla le Carre novel, a post-Cold War spy thriller that darkly marks the transition from old-school espionage to more modern Pure Intelligence, recounting a desperate, but carefully and meticulously planned operation to bring down a wealthy British arms dealer by a small joint British/US agency known as Enforcement, while a larger, more powerful and shadowy set of players with tentacles in all levels of government and finance across the globe run their show more own, parallel operation, and would very much prefer the smaller operation to bugger off actually, thank you very much.

Point man for Enforcement is Jonathan Pine, ex-soldier, now Night Manager at an exclusive Swiss Hotel. The arrival of the arms deal, Richard Roper, one snowy night sparks memories of an earlier incident in Egypt which ended with a bloody murder, and inspires Pine to offer his services to British Intelligence. He is thereby recruited, trained and transformed, then pointed at Roper, and fired.

Every sentence shines, every character burns, every twist and turn, whether it's Pine's sweaty, queasy infiltration of Roper's life and affairs, or the efforts of members of Enforcement in London and Miami to protect themselves and Jonathan from political and economic skullduggery and a brutal war between intelligence agencies, is described with a cool, tight grace and emotional restraint as the principals become gradually aware of the extent of their self-deception in thinking they could wrestle even the smallest of victories against corruption on such a scale. show less