It would be understandable were John le Carre to sit back, plump up the laurels (if you can do that to laurels) and rest up. In a writing career spanning five decades he has, after all, defined the spy novel, lifting it into the realms of literature, and given us some of the most memorable characters, set pieces and films of the post-1945 era. But he is stubbornly, exuberantly determined to keep exploring, in a world beset with wholly new paranoias, the men and (equally crucially) women who do bad and good by stealth. His new novel is basically a tale of guilty anger — on the part of the Hamburg spies who failed so miserably to latch on to Mohammed Atta and his colleagues; and on the part of the Brits and the Yanks who, desperate for success, are prepared to crawl over anyone for the sake of one small triumph, one imam they can “turn.”
Into Hamburg, then, sneaks a tortured Russian, possibly a Chechen, with scars both mental and physical and, most pertinently, the key to a safety deposit box containing the substantial and wholly ill-gotten gains of his late and despised father, one of the KGB colonels who used Western banks to turn black money white in the dying days of Soviet Russia. Enter the likable but hapless owner of the British (but Hamburg-based) private bank that had been used for these “Lipizzaner” deals (the famous horses are born black but turn white with age). Enter a difficult, delicately drawn female human-rights lawyer who sees in Issa, the refugee, the chance to make amends for previous deportations she failed to prevent. Enter, sotto voce, at least three national espionage networks, watching and planning their three-dimensional chess. The Germans, led by the intensely affable Gunther Bachmann, the book’s finest character, see a chance to use Issa to compromise a “moderate” Muslim TV cleric whose charities follow some odd conduits. The Americans want to come in all guns blazing, not just figuratively. The Brits want to skulk, threaten, wheedle, double-cross and steal credit.
What Le Carre has always done terrifically is to capture the nuances of the spying game. His spooks are wonderful. You find yourself believing you are in that room, quietly rooting for whoever commands your allegiance at that moment. He paints the scene so fully in his own mind before writing that you forget you’re reading fiction: every cough, every glance, each sip of bottled water feels as if it were part of a scrupulously honest documentary. It is also a delight to read a man who believes in proper continuity, when so many lesser thriller writers have waiters arriving with the first course three seconds after the diners have met.
Where Le Carre falls down, I think, is in capturing the burgeoning (or is it?) love triangle between the pretty lawyer, the rich but rubbish banker and the (frankly unlikable) refugee. Did Issa boff Annabel? Will Tommy get her instead? Frankly, who cares? This too-huge subplot fails to grip, and simply points up how much more riveting the real action is. Le Carre’s minor characters are never less than spot-on, but his three main ones are oddly shoehorned into emotions that we, the readers, fail to share with them. (And besides, Issa is so annoying that if the gung-ho Americans ever did end up fitting him for a dinky orange boiler-suit, I don’t think too many readers would be weeping.)
But these failures aren’t too disastrous. Relish, instead, the knowledge this book imparts about the men who have learned to talk just below the level of hotel music, and say small things with huge import; about the impossible moral Mobius strip handed to Western liberals by Islamicist jihad. In A Most Wanted Man you are, unlike the modern world, in thrillingly deft, safe hands.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
For the past century, Changhua has existed in Taichung’s shadow. These days, Changhua City has a population of 223,000, compared to well over two million for the urban core of Taichung. For most of the 1684-1895 period, when Taiwan belonged to the Qing Empire, the position was reversed. Changhua County covered much of what’s now Taichung and even part of modern-day Miaoli County. This prominence is why the county seat has one of Taiwan’s most impressive Confucius temples (founded in 1726) and appeals strongly to history enthusiasts. This article looks at a trio of shrines in Changhua City that few sightseers visit.
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