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selenakA remarkably trim and slender novel, almost a novella, this one, so when I had finished it after 200-something pages, I thought for a moment, hang on, where’s the rest? Before realising the end does bring everything full circle with the beginning, and really, that’s it.
As story, it’s Le Carré serving up the tropes he’s partly coined or remade in his image - betrayal both personal and institutional versus loyalties both personal and institutional, double and triple agents, homosocial bonding (minus actual gay sex), extraordinary male bitchiness among not-that-fond-of-each-other colleagues, handlers running agents, extracting agents etc., and sprinkling them with some dark humor (our hero’s trip to Eastern Europe in order check on a (former?) agent he’s been running gets reimbursed, but MI6 balks at the taxi to the airport) and a lot of ire. The ire is vented not through our narrator Nat, who is a model of tight-lipped middle aged self-restraint, only occasionally abandoning stoicism, but through various other characters, starting with young Ed Shannon, our hero’s badminton partner (badminton, as I learned through this novel, being an even tougher variation of squash), whose innocence, as every connosseur of the spy genre knows, can’t possibly outlast the genre he’s in, moving on to Arkady, angry Russian at large and former (or is he?) agent run by Nat, and including young Florence, by far the most promising and intelligent person in the service’s Russia section which of course means she gets ignored, cold shouldered and sabotaged, as well as Nat’s wife, civil rights lawyer Prudence, and their daughter Steff. You may have seen some lines quoted already - particularly memorable outburts include the description of Brexit as an “act of self-immolation” in which “the British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich, elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people”, the current President of the US as “Putin’s shithouse cleaner” (that one comes from Arkady), and the current PM as “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”.
(Nat more or less agrees with the sentiments voiced, if not the phrasing, though he draws the line when Ed, watching Trump on tv in Helsinki agreeing with with Putin re: Russian interference or lack of same over his own secret service, says that this is the Hitler/Stalin pact all over again, and points out that the Orange Menace might be the worst US President bar none but does not plan on anything beyond making as much cash out of it as possible, as opposed to genocide.)
(Death of the author not withstanding, it’s rather obvious Le Carré’s own sentiments on the state of current day Britain are similarly inclined.)
One suspects in terms of potential readers Le Carré is preaching to the choir here, though then again, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Anyway, what’s new, other than those very topical diatribes, is how the old “personal versus institutional loyalty” plot is played out this time. Citizen Cornwell (allusion justified by the fact one of the operations in this novel is codenamed “Rosebud”, with the main target codenamed Orson) displays some old fashioned humanism here. Without spoiling too much, it might be a pessimistic novel in terms of how it analyses the state of Britain and the world, but it’s downright optimistic about the capacity of the individual human being to retain a core decency regardless.
Lastly: Ed is a fan of Germany and the Germans, which is a plot point. Now Le Carré in his memoirs and interviews often displays fondness for our language and culture as well, but he’s also very clear eyed in his decription of Germany in the 1950s and early 60s, when he was stationed here, about just how many old (and not so old) Nazis were around (and could be entertainingly mean as with his memorable description of Bonn as “half the size of the Central Cemetary of Chicago and twice as dead”) so I’m assuming all the praise from young Ed should be taken with a pinch of salt. But given our current bunch of “Rightwing Identitarians”, to call them with the politest term posssible, being back in Parliament, Ed’s “how Germany and the Germans rock in having faced their past and learned from it, let me count the ways” monologue still makes me somewhere between ashamed (that alas we’re not as immunized to nationalist evil as Ed thinks we are) and oddly touched (that Le Carré included this love letter in the novel to begin with). It would be nice to live up to the praise.
As story, it’s Le Carré serving up the tropes he’s partly coined or remade in his image - betrayal both personal and institutional versus loyalties both personal and institutional, double and triple agents, homosocial bonding (minus actual gay sex), extraordinary male bitchiness among not-that-fond-of-each-other colleagues, handlers running agents, extracting agents etc., and sprinkling them with some dark humor (our hero’s trip to Eastern Europe in order check on a (former?) agent he’s been running gets reimbursed, but MI6 balks at the taxi to the airport) and a lot of ire. The ire is vented not through our narrator Nat, who is a model of tight-lipped middle aged self-restraint, only occasionally abandoning stoicism, but through various other characters, starting with young Ed Shannon, our hero’s badminton partner (badminton, as I learned through this novel, being an even tougher variation of squash), whose innocence, as every connosseur of the spy genre knows, can’t possibly outlast the genre he’s in, moving on to Arkady, angry Russian at large and former (or is he?) agent run by Nat, and including young Florence, by far the most promising and intelligent person in the service’s Russia section which of course means she gets ignored, cold shouldered and sabotaged, as well as Nat’s wife, civil rights lawyer Prudence, and their daughter Steff. You may have seen some lines quoted already - particularly memorable outburts include the description of Brexit as an “act of self-immolation” in which “the British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich, elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people”, the current President of the US as “Putin’s shithouse cleaner” (that one comes from Arkady), and the current PM as “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”.
(Nat more or less agrees with the sentiments voiced, if not the phrasing, though he draws the line when Ed, watching Trump on tv in Helsinki agreeing with with Putin re: Russian interference or lack of same over his own secret service, says that this is the Hitler/Stalin pact all over again, and points out that the Orange Menace might be the worst US President bar none but does not plan on anything beyond making as much cash out of it as possible, as opposed to genocide.)
(Death of the author not withstanding, it’s rather obvious Le Carré’s own sentiments on the state of current day Britain are similarly inclined.)
One suspects in terms of potential readers Le Carré is preaching to the choir here, though then again, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Anyway, what’s new, other than those very topical diatribes, is how the old “personal versus institutional loyalty” plot is played out this time. Citizen Cornwell (allusion justified by the fact one of the operations in this novel is codenamed “Rosebud”, with the main target codenamed Orson) displays some old fashioned humanism here. Without spoiling too much, it might be a pessimistic novel in terms of how it analyses the state of Britain and the world, but it’s downright optimistic about the capacity of the individual human being to retain a core decency regardless.
Lastly: Ed is a fan of Germany and the Germans, which is a plot point. Now Le Carré in his memoirs and interviews often displays fondness for our language and culture as well, but he’s also very clear eyed in his decription of Germany in the 1950s and early 60s, when he was stationed here, about just how many old (and not so old) Nazis were around (and could be entertainingly mean as with his memorable description of Bonn as “half the size of the Central Cemetary of Chicago and twice as dead”) so I’m assuming all the praise from young Ed should be taken with a pinch of salt. But given our current bunch of “Rightwing Identitarians”, to call them with the politest term posssible, being back in Parliament, Ed’s “how Germany and the Germans rock in having faced their past and learned from it, let me count the ways” monologue still makes me somewhere between ashamed (that alas we’re not as immunized to nationalist evil as Ed thinks we are) and oddly touched (that Le Carré included this love letter in the novel to begin with). It would be nice to live up to the praise.
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Date: 2019-11-06 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-06 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-06 04:35 pm (UTC)