Few readers will need an introduction to John le Carre, author of 23 novels about undercover agents, Cold War spies, devious corporate executives, arms dealers and UK government servants with doubts about where they really stand.
The Cold War gave le Carre his great subject, with the Soviet spy-master Karla and his self-effacing British counterpart George Smiley. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, le Carre lost no time in turning to the drugs trade in South America (The Night Manager, 1993), the pharmaceuticals industries (The Constant Gardener 2001), and a wide variety of other topics.
At the age of 82 he’s produced A Delicate Truth (now in paperback), probably one of his most gripping tales. Critics have written of his return to the world of the British Foreign Office, elite London clubs and ambiguous US/UK relations that characterized some of his most celebrated earlier books.
The story unfolds during the Blair administration in the UK. An undistinguished, middle-ranking British civil-servant is asked to take part in a nighttime operation on Gibraltar, then as now a UK colony. Not all is made clear in the frenzied opening chapter, but what we do see involves American mercenaries (not liable to prosecution in the International Criminal Court) and British Special Forces in disguise who are funded by a group on the US Republican evangelical right, and masterminded by a shady defense contractor — in other words an arms-dealer.
All appears to go as planned in what is presented to its participants as a counter-terror operation, and the civil-servant — code-named Paul — is flown back home a few days later. He’s surprised to find himself soon afterwards knighted, and appointed to a ceremonial post in a UK Caribbean territory.
On retirement in Cornwall (also le Carre’s home county), Paul finds himself visited by a disillusioned former colleague from the Gibraltar operation, a Welshman called Jeb. The operation didn’t go as successfully as thought: a mother and child were shot dead. In addition, Paul got his knighthood and index-linked pension, while Jeb got nothing. Paul is deeply troubled and, urged on by his wife and daughter, a doctor called Emily, he re-contacts Jeb and together they draw up a document detailing what, in their view, really happened.
Meanwhile, the Private Secretary to the UK minister originally overseeing the Gibraltar operation, one Toby Bell, becomes involved. He’d secretly tape-recorded a meeting of his boss and what he becomes convinced were conspirators linked to the arms dealer. Toby learns what Paul believes are the facts, and goes to Wales to track down Jeb, only to find that he’s just committed suicide. Jeb’s wife, however, is convinced it was the work of government agents, on the grounds that he was about to reveal unpalatable truths.
Paul, meanwhile, decides to go up to London and present the document he and Jeb were in the process of preparing to his former employees in the Foreign Office. His reception, though, is far from what he’d expected, and he only manages to escape to his home in Cornwall with the help of Emily, his saintly doctor daughter.
Toby Bell is not so fortunate, despite help from the angelic but practical Emily. The last pages of the novel are particularly engrossing — but we may have disclosed too much of the plot already.
Le Carre once said that the truth about the pharmaceutical industry was so terrible that if he’d included it all in The Constant Gardener no-one would have believed it. This time he proves himself no self-censor when it comes to what the UK establishment might get up to. We can choose not to believe it, of course, and reflect that this is, after all, a work of fiction. But the image of the aged author looking down onto the rocks from his cliff-side Cornish estate, and opting to tell it how it is and damn the consequences, is hard to resist.
For the rest, this is a page-turner to beat all page-turners. There were times in the earlier George Smiley novels when it was hard, what with the double-agents and in-house moles, to know precisely what had happened. There’s no such doubt here. This is a relatively straight-forward story, pitting those who want to tell the truth against those who prefer to have it concealed. There are complexities, of course, notably around the figure of one Giles Oakley, Toby’s former mentor in diplomatic matters, who may be gay, and who plays a decisive role at the very last minute.
A Delicate Truth shows Le Carre fully up-to-date in a modern world he probably doesn’t feel much affection for but is determined to depict anyway. This doesn’t only encompass things such as extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation methods, but innumerable minor features of contemporary life from encrypted cell-phones to Personnel Departments now re-christened Human Resources.
As always in Le Carre, there’s plenty of insider knowledge on display — where not to hide something when you expect a police raid, tell-tale signs that your premises are being watched — as well as an up-to-date understanding of modern weapons. “Give me a Predator drone and a couple of Hellfire missiles and I’ll show you what real collateral damage looks like.” There’s also homely wisdom that would sound like conspiracy theory if the author wasn’t someone who’d himself worked for the UK’s intelligence agencies — the police “aren’t the solution, they’re part of the problem,” and so on.
In a way this is an old man’s moral fable. “Tell truth and shame the Devil,” as Shakespeare’s Hotspur urges, also in Wales. Unfortunately in the modern world, at least according to Le Carre in this wonderful book, that is a lot easier said than done.
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