A vintage plot thickens

Here’s a Sunday chiller. From the depths of the utter bitter cold-recession, downsizing, uncertainty comes a genuine distraction: John le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man. Without taking your eyes off the goalposts — banking, money-laundering, terror, torture, American bullying — it scores with a bicycle kick.

So, spare a day for 340 pages of sheer craftsmanship. Simple, elegant, deft, slick, awesome. This is vintage Le Carre malting fiction for GenY (readers who been brought up on The Constant Gardener, a plot with Big Pharma as the villain) and Gen-Ex (readers who are still haunted by the bone-chilling intrigue of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  

In his latest thriller, private bankers, lawyers, victims of post-9/11 torture, Chechens, Brits and Germans provide a naked display of why teams don’t work; why fanaticism has many pasts; and why terror has unmasked the good old spy, turning him from a specialist to a general practitioner of espionage. This is the world that Le Carre explores and recreates with the pace of Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale and the tightness of Fred Zinnemann’s Day of the Jackal. 

You wonder: how did Le Carre architect his best shot, his super tactic, and his bare-knuckle display of 21st century espionage? How did he fashion his own Quantum of Malice? Without doubt, the book is not just a spy thriller. It is a must-have for Indian intelligence agencies whose biggest challenge is intel-gathering, interpretation and coordination. A smartly-timed page-turner that captures the brute energy of US excesses and bungling. No subtlety here, tough. It is a political statement that the writer can’t resist. It becomes the book’s leitmotif, its biggest differentiator.

You start asking yourself: who’s the most wanted man today? Who would manage a bloody messy global situation better —Barack Obama or John McCain? Is the US looking for a crisis manager or a strategist? Will McCain’s experience allow him to navigate the menacing waters of intrigue, deception and aggression? Will Obama’s freshness help create a new global order? Will Le Carre then reinvent himself? Who would his prime and sub-prime villains be?

As his latest book reveals, the post-Cold War world — a universe that the spy-cum-writer recreated for readers-has become complex, loud and instant. Here, trails don’t go cold; there are simply no trails. Spying is passé; adventurism is in. And mock-ups, screw-ups and mess-ups are the defining moments of reckless global daring.

As a private banker intones in the novel: “The staple of a private banker’s life… was not as one might reasonably expect, cash. It wasn’t bull markets, bear markets, hedge funds or derivatives. It was cock-up. It was the persistent, he would go so far as to say the permanent sound…of excrement hitting your proverbial fan.”  

It is this “permanent sound” that you hear throughout the book, a sound that explodes at the end, and keeps boomeranging. It is the sound of mindless bluster, linear thinking and unilateral action. It is a spy game without an end game.

Here’s how a Le Carre character, a member of the German intel service, defines the new game: “We are not policemen, we are spies. We do not arrest our targets. We develop them and redirect them at bigger targets. When we identify a network, we watch it, we listen to it, we penetrate it and by degrees we control it. Arrests are of negative value. They destroy a precious acquisition. They send you scribbling back to the drawing board, looking for another network half as good as the one you’ve just screwed up.”

Even if espionage and terror were to morph into something new, his script would still be cutting-edge. His plots are clinical but espionage is always an emotional slugfest in his hands. That makes writing and reading rich, deep and varied. He says on his website: “Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a 25 pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer’s instructions, taught children in a special school.”

Perhaps it’s time Le Carre came up with a book without spies. A book that delves into human existence rather than scribbles about it. A genuine classic with new goal-posts.
  
Email: vinaykamat@dnaindia.net