A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré
Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99
JOHN LE CARRÉ’s spy novels have always been a cut or two above the genre average. In traditional spy stories, a morally unambiguous threat to king and country is usually resolved by the triumph of a square-jawed chap who clearly and heroically represents the interests of the state. But le Carré, who worked for MI6, has never dealt in the comfortable gung-ho certainties of John Buchan and Ian Fleming and their ilk.
His books, from Cold War novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to more recent work like The Constant Gardener, depict a bleaker world in which there is little intellectual clarity about the nature of personal and professional loyalty, duty, patriotism and morality.
Le Carré has become a bit of a grumpy old git lately – and, as his friend Al Alvarez says, “Whatever else David is, he isn’t an old leftie” – but he has refused every honour he’s been offered and is sceptical, even scornful, of the establishment, too. He says: “We’ve sacrificed our sovereignty to a so-called ‘special relationship’ which has nothing special about it. I’m not anti-American but I’m anti the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld disaster of the last eight years.”
He believes the US government’s use of “extraordinary rendition” is wrong and that is the subject of his new novel in which a traumatised Muslim asylum-seeker – who may or may not be an Islamist militant, or Chechen freedom fighter, depending on your point of view – turns up in Hamburg where he is soon wanted by the competing secret services of Britain, Germany and America. It’s a morally complex modern novel which is also a rattling good read.
Keith Richmond
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