The Spying Game

Absolute Friends

By John Le Carre

It has been a while since I visited Le Carre land. But each time I return, I realize nothing fundamentally changes. The spies still live in a morally ambiguous world and the individual moral compass is often at odds with the official wisdom that defines good and bad. This tension between the individual and the state had its best moments in the Cold War era, though. In his more recent novels, Le Carre tends to be much more didactic with a very definitive point of view on the evil influence of corporations in modern day governments. This point of view still has its good moments - like in his The Constant Gardener, one of my all-time favourite Le Carre novels. Absolute Friends, however falls very short of this standard.

Ted Mundy is the British spy, one of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, born in Pakistan to an English army officer. He spends his early years in the subcontinent, is sent to boarding school in England, then goes on to Oxford to learn German, dropping out to join the ‘60s left-wing protests in Berlin against the ‘bourgeoisie’ American view of the world. He befriends Sasha, a natural leader in these left-wing groups, a German who is rebelling against his Nazi-sympathiser father turned good Christian. Ted saves Sasha’s life in one of the protests that turn violent, but is forced to flee Germany, going back to his native England, where he joins the British Council, marries a local school teacher with ambitions of labour party politics, has a kid and in general is all set to lead an ordinary life. But it is not meant to be. Sasha returns, this time as a defector to East Germany, wanting to play the dangerous spy game. Ted becomes his handler, and a double agent, with the East Germans thinking him theirs while all the while it’s the other way round. He starts leading multiple lives, one Ted to his wife and family, one to the East Germans, and the third real one - that of a double agent. Sasha and he play this dangerous game for years...until one day the Berlin wall comes down and there is nothing left to play. Sasha disappears, Ted’s marriage falls apart, and the next we see him, he is living in Berlin again, this time with a Turkish immigrant and her son, working as a tour guide, trying to put a failed business behind him. But there is one more twist in his life. Sasha is back to try and recruit him into one of his idealistic plans for the world. But this end game turns out to be one twist too many. The plot begins to meander into one of the least credible parts of the story… and one is left feeling Le Carre was actually writing a different novel in the last part. It is a ridiculous end to an otherwise moderately-engaging story.

Ted Mundy is the quintessential Le Carre hero. Ordinary, every-day man, living a heroic life, unknown to the rest of the world - an unsung, unrecognized hero. Sasha is the friend, but he is a shadowy character, never completely clear in his motives and actions to the reader, a mystery influence on Ted. It is this blurry character that makes the whole plot somewhat vague and insubstantial. The other characters are all mostly props in the Ted and Sasha show. And it is a show that disappointing and strangely irritating - especially when you know what Le Carre can normally do with plot and character.

Our Kind of Traitor

John Le Carrė

Le Carrė's British spy world looks a bit different after the end of the Cold War. Le Carrė is 80, Berlin now is the subject of cool travel magazines rather than the battleground of the Cold War, Britain's importance in the global spy market is a bit long in the tooth. But Our Kind of Traitor proves there is no questioning the competence of this man in writing suspenseful thrillers.

This time the context is the global financial markets and the dubious antecedents of the immense amounts of money that drive it. The Russian mafia has its tentacles everywhere, including the Mumbai stock market and the high end British banking establishment. And the opposition is a maverick spy with a conscience in MI6.

Dima is the Russian money launderer who wants to come in. And his choice of the messenger is downright strange. Perry and Gail. The blonde and beautiful Oxford professor of English and his equally blonde and beautiful girlfriend lawyer. Or barrister as the English say. They are on a tennis holiday (who goes on tennis holidays???) in the Caribbean when the Russian with his sons, daughters, his second wife and his bodyguards accosts them with a proposal that has them scurrying to the British spy system. It makes Perry and Gail enter the shadowy world, eager to escape their more mundane existences; and we the readers get to see this new murky world through the eyes of excited newbies.

The spies are Luke and Hector. Luke is the background man, the spy we see in all of Le Carrė's fiction, a quiet ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances fighting a war far bigger than his personal exigencies. Hector is the man running this particular show, a maverick in the system, out to nail the ones who make a mockery of the system. All a tad old-fashioned in the new world order driven by politics and money.

The gift is in the narrative. And the precision of the characterisation. We are drawn into the Luke and Hector narrative, men with personal foibles and problems, yet driven to their dangerous jobs with a sense of something bigger than themselves. Nothing pretentious or jingoistic, just some good old-fashioned British understated sense of fair play.

Le Carrė's signature was his injection of moral ambiguity into the spy thriller. His world was never a James Bond like evocation of sheer evil and implausible good. The moral ambiguity is alive and kicking here as well, where political expedience fights and wins against personal morality. That is Le Carrė's lasting legacy. And in his later novels, these become more pronounced - institutional corruption and governments doing wicked things are becoming more the norm rather than the exception. It is reflective of a less innocent world than the one Smiley encountered.

Our Kind of Traitor has its low moments - Perry and Gail's initial encounters with Dima are terribly drawn out and boring. But Le Carrė makes up for it as the story goes along, gaining tautness and a dark foreboding sense of menace. There is truly no greater pleasure than surrendering yourself to the competent hands of a master storyteller.

The Le Carré Marathon

Four books of Le Carré back-to-back bring in the new year for me. My education in the spy genre has been sadly lacking so far. This was meant to be my start.

A Murder of Quality was my first book. There is a spy in it; a famous one at that – George Smiley. But he plays a provincial detective more than a spy in it, much like Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. In fact the book took me back to Agatha Christie mysteries, in the classic whodunit mould. Smiley is asked to go to a venerable British institution, a public school by the name of Carne, by an old friend as a favour. The friend edits a genteel Christian paper and she has just received a letter from an old reader, now a faculty wife at Carne. The letter writer Stella Rode warns of a threat to her life by her husband. And when Smiley reaches Carne, she is already dead. It takes Smiley, obviously a public-school type (the class distinctions are as alive as ever) a few days, some glasses of sherry, long conversations and a lot of thinking to get at the murderer (obviously nothing as obvious as the husband!). It is a very English detective tale, with characters in the typical stiff upper lip mould. A nice Sunday evening, hot cup of tea-in-hand kind of book.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is the real McCoy, the book that made Le Carré famous. 1950’s cold war Berlin is the milieu and the British spy network in East Berlin has mostly collapsed. Mundt, the East German head of intelligence is the ruthless opponent responsible. Alex Leamas, the head of the Berlin bureau, is assigned his last job before he can come in from the cold – to infiltrate the East German intelligence and get Mundt. As a cover, he is fired from the circus (the Le Carré name for the British secret service), takes to drink and is accused of theft. His reputation in tatters, he is approached by the East Germans. His move East and the quite spine-chilling events that follow are what make this the classic it is. It made me quite eager to read the next in my list Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

TTSS is where George Smiley gets to be the spy the world knows. It is the first of the series featuring Karla, the Russian intelligence director. George Smiley is asked to come out of a reluctant retirement to smoke out a high-ranking mole in the Circus. It is a re-creation of the famous Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five case, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy being code names for the suspects. It is an intricate tale, with the final story being pieced together by Smiley by looking through stolen files, conversations with older Circus personnel and his own personal memories.

Le Carré’s spy world is gritty and tense and hard nosed in a way James Bond never is. Treachery is a way of life. His spies are not good looking, there are no blonde bombshells and there definitely are no cool gadgets. Smiley is pot-bellied, Leamas is short and stocky. The enemy is never ever very clear – we know they are East German or Russian, yet there is ambiguity in what is true evil. Somehow, there is more honour in Fiedlar, the loyal Russian than Mundt, the British agent. It is a murky world, where family and friends have only dangerous roles, if they have any at all. There is a tone of skepticism and moral ambiguity that a traditional spy-thriller would lack. This is I guess is really what makes Le Carré’s spy series so unique in its space. I am left with a desire to explore more.

And so I move onto the next one – The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It takes me a long time to finish it. I dislike it intensely. It is not a spy-thriller for one. It reads like a cross between Maugham’s Razor’s Edge and his The Moon and Sixpence. It is in my mind bad Maugham – with the fascination for that Bohemian lifestyle and philosophy so favoured by him, yet without his flair for making that life so positive and uplifting. Shamus is no Larry Darrel or Strickland and draws little sympathy from me. Aldo Cassidy is a fool and I cannot understand his obsession with Shamus and Helen. I am terribly disappointed with Le Carré for not sticking to what he seems to do well – write a good thriller. I cannot wait to get to the last page.

It has been a marathon read. It leaves me hungry for more in the Karla series. And strangely enough, hungry for a Somerset Maugham re-read.