Review of Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor

The end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War helped usher in a new age of neoliberal ‘reform’ which has led, among other things, to the looting of the Russian state and the creation of a new class of mega-rich mafia-connected asset strippers. Their principal concern has been to shore up their domestic power base and then export as many assets overseas as possible so they can live a life of luxurious expat indulgence. One such, in John Le Carre’s latest and characteristically intelligent and elegant novel, is Dima – a former zek (prison camp criminal) and vor (one who abides by the gangster code of honour).

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Review of Le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim

Any book that features George Smiley, the most unlikely seeming of all spies, adds to the joy of the world and this one, The Secret Pilgrim, is no exception. In this case, Smiley is an outsider (he so often is, I suppose) whose interaction with the next generation of secret agents at their training centre frames the action. That action concerns the life and times of a certain Ned, who has become a senior person in the service and seen the various types of betrayal that so often characterises the world of espionage.
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Review of Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama

When a gentleman’s tailor in Panama (which will immediately bring to mind Graham Greene’s creation, of course) is revealed to be a fantasist becoming mixed up with a spymaster all too willing to swallow any kind of nonsense, it soon becomes very evident that it is all going to end very badly for someone and perhaps for everyone. This being John Le Carre, the small infelicities and betrayals of individuals are inexorably caught up in processes that lead to nation-shaking events.

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Review of John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener

It is unusual for me to read a book after having seen the film version of it, since I read many more books than watch films. Knowing the shape of the events, therefore, I was interested to read the extent to which the film’s director followed the plot as outlined by Le Carre, who of course is a master of plot and character. In the interests of not giving too much away to anyone who has yet to come across either version, I will reveal only that the two are unified for quite a long period of the book and then close more or less in the same way, although Le Carre is notably realistic in his opinions about the way the world works or, in other words, somewhat more pessimistic than is generally considered suitable for the Silver Screen.

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Review of John Le Carre’s Our Game

The ending of the Cold War was thought by some to signal the end of the spy novel: if there was no one left on whom to spy, the argument went, then there would be no need to write about the spying that would not take place. Here in 2009 it is known that the rise of the terrorist threat has been more than enough to justify substantial budgets for clandestine operations.

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Review of A Most Wanted Man

In the post-Cold War world, John Le Carré’s fiction has generally focused on a combination of the inequities visited on the vulnerable of the world, which can no longer be excused even by the weasel excuses of ideological conviction, together with the moral ambiguities facing those brought into the action more or less against their will. Generally, willing protagonists are the true believers, in one way or another, whose actions cause the problems that afflict the lives of those who are left behind them or who merely have the misfortune to get in the way.

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Review of A Small Town in Germany

In the aftermath of the Second World War, high ideals established the Nuremburg Trials and the various protocols established to hand over power to German authorities. The pressure of lack of resources (Britain, in common with other European powers, felt like a country that had lost rather than won the war) together with human inadequacy generally meant that these high ideals could not always be sustained.

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Review of Call for the Dead by John Le Carre

In his book Violence, Slavoj Zizek identified as one of the principal causes of violence or, at least, the method of avoiding it, the need to accept the presence of a neighbour. Neighbours are other people–they are different and it is an effort not to force them away. The ability of people to accept neighbours is, therefore, the source of urban living and much of culture while also representing a source of stress and potential rage. Perhaps this is why spies, once unmasked, are often treated with such contempt and hatred and the need to suppress their identity causes the agents themselves such anomie. The stranger in our midst is, after all, a staple of popular media and received much more attention in the Communist scare American society of the 1950s and 60s, which was the cause of so much of the science fiction of the Invasion of the Pod People style. The early series of the British spy programme Spooks, for example, took as one of its main theses the isolation and misery of the lone spy, together with the temptations that come the way of such agents.
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Review of The Russia House

A new generation of spies has taken over from the time of George Smiley and the Circus. Times have changed too, as the Cousins, who were once well-resourced allies at approximately the same level of ability, now bankroll all espionage operations–the Americans now routinely receive all intelligence discovered by the British services while occasionally and perhaps begrudgingly considering whether to release some needful titbit from time to time. Yet there remain times when a person on the spot can circumvent all the technology and resources that can be thrown at an operation: so, when a Russian publisher is looking to pass on a secret manuscript from a friend to a western contact who is not available, she gives it to a substitute whom she is obliged to trust in the hope that he will prove to be a good and faithful person.

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