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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
John le Carre talks about his new war-on-terror novel, the "medieval stupidity" of the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence, and why he wound up marching against the war in Iraq.
Jan 5, 2004 | Spy novels are supposed to be a form of escapism, and most still feature cardboard characters, easy moral decisions and reasonably tidy endings. But a separate vein in espionage fiction, with its roots in novels by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, takes the spy -- an assumer of false identities and a trader in information, compelled by circumstances to betray his own values -- as an exemplar of the modern man or woman: just like us, only more so. John le Carré is today's master of the unromantic espionage novel. In "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and his other books, hardly anyone is glamorous and by the end you can't always be sure who, if anyone, is on the side of right. As a result, le Carré never runs out of timely material, no matter what the geopolitical situation may be.
Since the end of the Cold War, le Carré -- who years ago admitted to playing a "tiny" part in the conflict during a stint as a British spy in Germany from 1959 to 1964 -- has found plenty to write about in the contemporary scene. From the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to the soulless skulduggery of multinational pharmaceutical corporations in Africa, he seems more engaged -- and decidedly more outraged -- than ever before. Le Carré's latest novel, "Absolute Friends" (to be published Jan. 12), takes on the War on Terror and the U.S. invasion of Iraq; if anything, he finds the wilderness of smoke and mirrors surrounding both more treacherous than the old-school intrigues between the Soviets and the West.
The hero of "Absolute Friends," Ted Mundy, is an Englishman with international yearnings, a former spy who was dragged into the secret world in the 1970s by Sasha, a German-born friend of his firebrand '60s youth. Reduced in the post-Cold War years to working as a tour guide in one of King Ludwig's Bavarian castles, Mundy rails against Britain's support for the war in Iraq. But when Sasha resurfaces and invites Mundy to do more than talk, the choice turns out to be trickier than either anticipates. Salon reached le Carré at his home in England to talk with him about the role of intelligence agencies in the post-Sept. 11 era, the eternal problem of reconciling politics with human decency and his dismay at seeing two nations he admires embroiled in a war he deplores.
What interests you in writing about a character like Mundy, who's the pawn of a lot of external forces, rather than a man like George Smiley [the protagonist of "Tinker, Tailor" and several other novels], who is usually driving the action?
Sasha and Mundy appealed to me because both men are historical prisms. They're relics of history. Mundy, of his father's colonial history and of the unbreakable English class system that sets him up as a member of the chosen class, and Sasha with that appalling background that he comes from, which extends back into Nazism. What brings them together is the feeling, though they never quite express it, that their origins should not become their destinies. They're determined to make new people of themselves.
I've always struggled to reconcile human decency with political necessity. When you talk about the two kinds of character, actually George Smiley is both kinds. He's somebody who can make things happen but also, during those Cold War years, accepted that he was the creature of almost unstoppable forces. He was a kind of moderator between the two great monoliths. I don't think it's quite so easy as to say that there are those who manipulate and those who are manipulated.
Nick Amory, Mundy's former handler, is another fascinating character.
To me he's the son of Smiley. He's inherited all that stuff and he believes in the service he's performing to his country and the service that he's a member of. But he's completely dismayed by the way the world has gone. He says somewhere, "I used to believe that I was right to lie for my country, and now I don't know what the truth is."
He seems more lost in a way than Mundy is.
I think we're all wrestling at the moment, wherever we stand politically -- I don't mean that in party-political terms or doctrinal terms, but however we feel about the present state of affairs -- wrestling with interpretations of patriotism and loyalty. As somebody who played his part in the Cold War in a minute way, I think of myself as somebody who loves my country. But it's taken a terribly wrong step. And therefore my own sense of patriotism is confused.
A wrong step in following the U.S. into the war in Iraq?
Yes. I love America and see America as, historically speaking, the great shining light of liberal thought and opinion and many liberal actions -- from Jefferson to Kennedy and beyond. But what with what is happening now, my views are not anti-American but they are profoundly anti-neocon ideologue. I think that a great country is being propelled by the wrong forces and my own country mistook the current. I'm told that Blair could practically run for president in the United States. The comedy is that his position here is anything but stable.
That must be a shock.
It is a shock, especially for those like myself who wept for joy when he was elected at the end of that dreadful post-Thatcher period, finally. It is extraordinary to discover that we voted for somebody whose neoconservative position was really no different to Thatcher's. Mercifully, he has enacted social reforms to a small degree, but the vision that we had of a more liberal country has, I think, been greatly disappointed.
