John le Carre (nee David Cornwell) has gotten more play from a five year stint in the British Foreign Service than anyone has a right to. He is also in an odd situation: he is both a past master of the novel and a struggling new writer. As a student of the Cold War and the author of the "Karla trilogy" and its predecessors, le Carre is an odds on favourite (as he might spell it) for the best genre writer of his generation worldwide. In
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
The Honourable Schoolboy, and
Smiley's People, he transcended his niche into full-on social critique, narrative mastery, and stylistic genius. No one has gotten it so right for so many pages since -- and many have put forward admirable efforts. Yet, the woefully troubling slide into the post Cold War era that saw le Carre put out such subsequent books as
The Night Manager,
The Tailor of Panama (Graham Greene needs a cover band about as much as The Beatles did), and
Single & Single, revealed nothing so much as a precocious young writer trying -- and failing -- to hit his stride.
I am pleased, therefore, to announce that -- although I swore at one point to never buy a le Carre again -- his recent
Our Kind of Traitor hints at a return to form. All the basic framing is there: British spies, class warfare conducted through trade craft even more occult than that of the Secret Service at its height, exotic and depressing locales, spare tension leeched through laconic and detached men who ghost through their lives and careers as unacclaimed soloists, and -- ta duh! -- Russians. All this solid bone structure lets le Carre's book look pretty on the runway no matter what today's mode. The student of the Cold War has returned to teach us that everything old is new again.
A case in point taken from the scene where long-serving intelligence maven Hector Meredith is recruiting career washout Luke Weaver to join his newest division, the Counterclaim Focus Group:
"'What's the most dire, fucking awful thing you've ever seen in your life? Anywhere? Apart from the business-end of a drug lord's Uzi staring you in the face. Pot-bellied starving kids in the Congo with their hands chopped off, barking mad with hunger, too tired to cry? Fathers castrated, cocks stuffed in their mouths, eyeholes full of flies? Women with bayonets stuck up their fannies?'
Luke had never served in the Congo, so he had to assume Hector was describing an experience of his own.
'We did have our equivalents,' he said.
'Such as what? Name a couple.'
'Columbian government having a field day. With American assistance, naturally. Villages torched. Inhabitants gang-raped, tortured, hacked to bits. Everybody dead except the one survivor left to tell the tale.'
'Yes. Well. We've both seen a bit of the world then,' Hector conceded. 'Not wanking around.'
'No.'
'And the dirty money sloshing about, the profits of pain, we've seen that too. In Columbia alone,
billions.
You've seen that. Christ know what your man was worth.' He didn't wait for the answer. 'In the Congo,
billions. In Afghanistan,
billions. An eighth of the world's fucking economy: black as your hat. We know about it.'
'Yes. We do.'
'Blood money. That's all it is.'
'Yes.'
'Doesn't matter where. It can be in a box under a warlord's bed in Somalia or in a City of London bank next to the vintage port. It doesn't change colour. It's still blood money.'
'I suppose it is.'
'No glamour, no pretty excuses. The profits of extortion, drug dealing, murder, intimidation, mass rape, slavery. Blood money. Tell me if I'm overstating my case.'
'I'm sure you're not.'
'Only four ways to stop it.
One: you go for the chaps who are doing it. Capture 'em, kill 'em or bang 'em up. If you can.
Two: you go for the product. Intercept it before it reaches the street or the marketplace. If you can.
Three: collar the profits, put the bastards out of business.'
A worrying pause while Hector seemed to reflect on matters far above Luke's pay grade. Was he thinking of the heroin dealers who had turned his son into a goalbird and addict? Or the
vulture capitalists who had tried to put his family firm out of business, and sixty-five of the best men and women in England on the rubbish heap?
'Then there's the
fourth way,' Hector was saying. 'The really bad way. The best tried, easiest, the most convenient, the most common, and the least fuss. Bugger the people who've been starved, raped, tortured, died of addiction. To hell with the human cost. Money's got no smell as long as there's enough of it and it's ours. Above all, think big. Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few
billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a
statistic.'"
-
Our Kind of Traitor. le Carre, John. New York (NY): Viking, 2010. p. 131-2.
Today's new normal apparently requires the same old skill sets, it's just that now the expenditures need annual budget justifications. But once the op is approved, the men and women who execute it still sweat it out in safe houses, stumble through opaque ethical murk, and cobble together teams of odd personalities with fringy skills. And John le Carre has always had a pretty good feel for that kind of thing. Welcome back, Kotter.
PS - Hector's my kind of guy. Oh, and "
Tightrope" by Janelle Monae is my kind of song; now playing on iTunes.
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