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 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.

The Typhoon Lover

In her early twenties, Japanese-American Rei Shimura fell into two careers - one as an antiques expert and one as a detective.  A decade and eight novels later, Rei is now 30 and Sujita Massey has solved the problem of how to explain why a woman in a seemingly genteel job keeps coming across dead bodies.  The day after Rei's surprise 30th birthday party (thrown at a hot new club by her on-and-off fiance, Hugh), she drags herself to a 9 am interview at the Smithsonian...except it's at rather than with the museum.  Rei's former lover, Takedo, has apparently become involved in smuggling antiquities out of Iraq and the CIA thinks Rei can use him to recover an ancient ewer.  

Maybe Rei fell for the bait (she's been barred from traveling to Japan and if she takes this job, the State Department will end that), or maybe she realizes that her relationship with Hugh (described as arguments punctuated by great sex) is falling apart.  Either way, she did not expect to find Takeo engaged to a high-strung girl from a political family or that she and Takeo would have a one night stand in the middle of a storm.  After some dead ends, Rei finds that the smuggler is much closer than she though.