A Near Perfect Spy Novelist

A year ago now, when the Bush Administration was preparing the world for an American invasion of Iraq, John le Carré wrote a column of scathing, sharp-toothed commentary for the Times of London. "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness," the piece began, "worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war." The master of espionage fiction went on to assert that "the religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be." In a full-throated critique of "the Bush junta," le Carré rejected the with-us-or-with-the-terrorists choice Washington offered the rest of the planet and regretted, most of all, the world's failure to construct any middle ground in the matter of Saddam Hussein. "I'm dead against Bush," he wrote, "but I would love to see Saddam's downfall--just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy."

One may not want to begin a consideration of any author's fiction with reference to his political views. A novel is an implicitly transformative work, after all, and a novelist's opinions as to the nature of public events are something altogether different. But it is too tempting to relate the two in le Carré's case. Both the author and the commentator have become increasingly and openly political in recent years. And le Carré doesn't seem to want readers to miss this point. His most recent book, The Constant Gardener, was a frontal attack on the Third World testing practices of the global pharmaceutical giants, and he chose to add a pointed postscript. "As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed," he wrote, "I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."

Absolute Friends, le Carré's nineteenth novel in a career that now spans five decades, arrives with no such label attached, but it doesn't need one. Through the thoughts and conversations of its main characters, le Carré takes on everything from Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and the partition of British India to the Shah of Iran, the Greek colonels, the Vietnam War and, yes, last year's invasion of Iraq. Very little of the postwar era is left out, and one is left wondering about the extent to which le Carré has made himself a ventriloquist in this book, speaking more directly through his invented voices than longtime devotees of his fiction might expect.

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