The Russia House

I wonder what it was like to read The Russia House as the Soviet Union was collapsing.  Back then, I was mostly reading what my parents called "books without words" (chemistry and chemical engineering textbooks), and lighter weight mysteries to take my mind off polymerization and kinetics. 30 years later, we know how things turned out, and once again Russia is an enemy, albeit not officially declared.

That time lapse colors my view of The Russia House.  I know how pointless Barley Blair's missions, but perhaps that's the entire point.  Blair is the head of a small, family-owned publishing house, one that specializes in safe, unchallenging genre fiction. On a prior trip to the Moscow Book Fair, he spent a long, vodka-soaked afternoon with a few writers and a physicist.  Several years later, that physicist gives his former lover three notebooks he wants published in the west, and she gives them to Blair's representative at the latest book fair.  It seems simple, but of course it's not.  Blair is only tangentially involved in his company's business at this point, more interested in leading a slightly dissipated life in Spain, and no one knows whether the notebooks are legitimate.  MI6 takes a chance on Blair and the notebooks and sends him to Moscow where he falls in love with his contact.  As is the case with many of LeCarre's books, the complex plot ultimately leads to a disquieting futility, but his use of language is superb.

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carre's heroes aren't heroic.  They're world-weary men and women for whom spying isn't exactly a game, but they realize they might not be on the side of right.  A Most Wanted Man makes everyone a pawn.  The young man who may be a terrorist sleeper or an aspiring medical student.  The family who take him in and may be an apolitical mother and son who wish to become naturalized German citizens or a religious fanatic and a budding terrorist.  The banker whose father laundered money smuggled out of the collapsing USSR for the young man's putative father.  The idealistic woman who works for a refugee agency and may be falling for her charge.  Le Carre portrays them all vividly, but they don't matter.  What matters is the trap they make for the most wanted man.  Whether by design or not, Le Carre's plot was secondary to the atmospheric vignettes he strung together, creating an interesting novel in which the espionage is more of a background than the primary reason for the book.

Call for the Dead

George Smiley was always a spy, but his first appearance was in a traditional mystery novel.  Shortly after Smiley interviewed Samuel Fennan about a letter questioning Fennan's possible communist leanings, Fennan committed suicide.  Why, though, did the dead man request a wake-up call for the morning after his death?  Smiley, with the assistance of Peter Guillam and recently retired Police Inspector Mendel delves into Fennan's past and finds a connection to his own WWII spying.  Not quite convinced that Fennan was compromised, Smiley comes up with an alternate interpretation of the facts.  Which one is the truth?

Call for the Dead is a brief, tightly plotted mystery which outlines George Smiley's subdued, analytical character.  Different in tone from LeCarre's spy novels (and from the movie Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy which I re-watched last night), it's a good introduction to the author's elegant prose and most famous character.

The Night Manager

A single act turned Jonathan Pine from a Cairo hotel manager into a spy.  One night a guest asked Pine to copy some documents.  The guest, though, was a local criminal's mistress and ex-wife of Richard Onslow Roper, the Worst Man in the World, and the documents involved gunrunning.  Pine made his own copies and gave them to a friend at the British consulate.  With this act (and why did he do it? Le Carre doesn't give Pine's motivation), he causes Sophie's murder.

Two years later, Pine meets Roper.  The Worst Man in the World and his entourage check into the Zurich hotel where Pine now works and after a disquieting encounter, Pine offers himself to the secret service.  He's accepted and given a series of new, shady identities before being set up to save Roper's 7-year-old son from kidnappers.  Roper is grateful, but doesn't quite trust him; Roper's second-in-command Major Corkoran, believe Pine is a plant.  Le Carre alternates between scenes of Pine's assimilation into Roper's criminal enterprise and scenes of his handlers sweating it out (sometimes literally) in tiny, drab rooms.  The plot is perhaps a bit too complicated, but Le Carre's language, as usual, is evocative enough to gloss over a little confusion.  Because of this (and an unconvincing romantic subplot), I rank The Night Manager a step or two below the other Le Carre books I've read.  Very good, but with a few flaws that prevent it from reaching excellence.

The Mission Song

It's appropriate that I was struck by the language in The Mission Song - after all, the central character is a translator.  Perhaps that's why John le Carre used lyric cadences which washed over me, pulling me into the novel long before I became engrossed in the plot.  Bruno Salvador (Salvo), is the illegitimate son of an Irish priest and an African woman.  Raised in a series of missions and schools, his natural ear for languages has made him the top translator in London, specializing in African dialects.  Married to a socially prominent rising tabloid editor (bringing to mind a blonde Rebekah Brooks), he translates for whomever needs him, including MI6.

That's the "important client" which calls Salvo away from the black tie event celebrating his wife's promotion.  They need Salvo to translate (and not translate) during a delicate negotiation among several African leaders.  It's the "not translate" which piques Salvo's interest.  He's a translator, not just translating but interpreting what he hears, and he just can't turn that off.  He can't pretend to not understand all he understands, and when he learns that the plan MI6 has formulated will harm rather than help Africa, he can't let the plan stand.  Especially since he's fallen in love with a nurse from his mother's native region.  Salvo tries to undo some of the damage created by the meeting where he translated (and didn't translate), but he's naive and not as well connected as he thought.  It ends badly for him (although with some consolations), but because the language le Carre used is so beautiful, it's easy as a reader to minimize that fact.

The Constant Gardener

Warning - possible spoilers

Two weeks ago, the journal Science published an article claiming that reading literature improves your social skills.  While I generally agree with Neil Gaiman that so-called "fluff" reading has imaginative value, I also take issue with the assumption that genre fiction is fluff.  Some of it is - but some literary fiction is so concerned with being "literary" that the author downplays minor details like plot and characterization, resulting in a book that one can admire, but not really like.  Yes, there's some mediocre (or worse) genre fiction on the market and selling well, but I can't agree that a mystery can't be literature.

My first exhibit?  The Constant Gardner.  It appears to be an action-movie-in-waiting: a well-known espionage novelist, exotic locales, and an unsolved murder.   Lift off the first layer and you'll find an indictment of the modern pharmaceutical industry, and below that a love story in retrospect.  It also takes place largely in the mind of a grieving man, desperate to solve his wife's murder before he too dies violently.

Le Carre's novel starts as a conventional suspense novel.  Sandy Woodrow, a British diplomat in Nairobi, learns that another diplomat's wife has been found, murdered.  Tessa Quayle was, well, a bit of an embarrassment to the embassy; much younger than her undistinguished husband, flirty, and prone to quixotic forays into social justice.  Woodrow and his wife organize the funeral and hide Justin Quayle from the press, both men submit to police questioning about Tessa's life and death, and Justin returns to England.  So far, an ordinary if well-written mystery, highlighted by acidic sketches of domesticity in the diplomatic corps.  Once Justin returns to England, though, The Constant Gardener changes, becoming a more reflective piece which takes place more and more in Justin's mind as he travels through Europe, to Canada, and finally back to Africa, trying both to solve his wife's murder and to complete her mission.

You see, the diplomatic corps had completely misjudged Tessa.  She wasn't a flirt, but deeply in love with Justin (and Justin with her).  Neither was she a quixotic campaigner, but an Oxbridge trained lawyer and human rights campaigner who'd discovered that a promising anti-malarial drug had toxic side effects and that a corner-cutting pharmaceutical company didn't know - or care.  Using Justin's grief to frame the flashbacks, le Carre subtly transforms Tessa Qualye from a shallow dilettante to a fully realized character.  Perhaps she's a bit too "good" (after all, we're seeing her through the memories of her widower), but she's real, too stubborn and perhaps naive to be a saintly victim.  Justin also transforms from a middle-aged, mid-level, mediocrity into a man desperate to complete his wife's quest, even (or perhaps hopefully) at the cost of his own life.

I mentioned above that I believe The Constant Gardner is literature, despite its genre status.  It engaged both my emotions and my intellect more than some classics have (coincidence-heavy Jane Eyre, with the two-dimensional Mr. Rochester, for example).  Le Carre also had a more difficult task than the non-genre novelist, because he had to stay within a framework.  Genre fiction isn't easier than straight fiction - it's harder.  The author has the same duty to use rich language, create engaging characters, and craft a believable plot as any other novelist, but has to do so without violating the genre's rules.  Le Carre succeeded on this level as well.  After finishing the novel, I woke up in the middle of the night.  It wasn't because of a noise outside, or because I was thirsty or uncomfortable - it was because I second-guessed myself on the identity of Tessa's killer.

The Tailor of Panama

Espionage lives on lies.  You lie while trying to break through your opponent's lies, so how do you know if your source is telling the truth?  And do you care?  Harry Pendel of Braithwaite & Pendel, tailors to the most powerful men in Panama, has spent his entire adult life lying - harmless lies, to cover up his background, but he's become quite good at creating plausible fictions.  Andrew Osnard knows this, and he knows that Harry has squandered his wife's inheritance on a failing rice farm.  Who better than Pendel, who has access to the Panamanian power structure, to ferret out information on the fate of the Canal?

The Tailor of Panama is technically a spy novel, but the espionage is secondary to the interpersonal relationships.  Osnard is a con man, and though it's obvious to those at the highest levels of the service, they don't care and don't bother to inform those who believe he's a hard working spy.  He's so good at telling others what they want to hear that you wonder why he believes the elaborate stories Pendel tells him of the "Silent Opposition," or why he believes that Micky Abraxas, an alcoholic on the verge of suicide, is the leader.  Maybe he doesn't believe Harry - and doesn't care.  Osnard has no ties to anyone, no family, no friends, and his girlfriend is really just someone he has sex with.  Harry, though, has a family - two children and a wife who is slowly descending into the madness of her childhood memories, and two close friends, all of whom face the repercussions of his lies.  Eventually, Osnard walks away from the chaos he caused, leaving Harry to pick up the pieces of shattered lives in a broken country.