First published 2019. Penguin, paperback, 2020, pp 366, c.90,000 words.
This is classic Le Carré and one of his best. We are back in the world of MI6 and something smells bad. Our hero – for once not a public-school boy – is a former runner of agents in eastern Europe and is being shuffled out. He is given his last desk job in an annex for unimportant cases, rather reminiscent of Slough House from Mick Herron’s novels. But, as with Slough House, forgotten agents start to deliver, and then all the big guns want to put their oar in one way or another.
This is set in the London of the day it was written. Britain has voted for Brexit, Trump is in the White House and Putin is taking Russia back to Stalinist mode. All is bad. Except that it provides fertile ground for Le Carré to vent his spleen, which is all good fun. Striking parallels are drawn with the rise of Naziism, only this time modern Germany appears to be on the right side, loved by the heroes.
Le Carré writes fluently as always. Once or twice I stumbled on a complex sentence in my race through it, but on re-reading, I realised that the syntax and punctuation were absolutely fine. His targets are familiar: Big Pharma (OK, they are not angels, but they do come up with life enhancing treatments once in a while), and investment managers for the very rich (OK, they are not angels), politicians of the right, and the ambitious generally. Wives tend to be cleverer and / or more on the side of the angels than their husbands. On the whole the men are more finely nuanced, with internal moral conflicts and personal strengths and flaws, while the women tend to be drawn more in black or white. The London of 2018 is familiar and well sketched in.
The pacing is excellent with a gradual ramping up of the tension and the action. I saw one or two of the consequences of situations before they were described, but somehow they were resolved in a way that was twisted from my expectations. There were a couple of very neat surprises. The ending was a bit sudden and rather implausible. Someone once said that stories should end with marriage, but I wasn’t entirely convinced about the longevity of almost any of the couplings up here.
If you like Le Carré, you will enjoy this one, even if you voted for Trump or Brexit (or indeed Putin.)
© William John Graham, June 2022