LONDON, 9 December 2003 — The hero of John le Carre’s 19th novel is a former Cold War double agent called Ted Mundy, now reduced to taking tourists around one of Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. As sartorially challenged as George Smiley, he wears a bowler that’s more Laurel and Hardy than Savile Row and has a union flag Velcroed to his breast pocket.
When we meet him, he is meditating, in front of a multicultural gaggle of English speakers, on Ludwig’s megalomania: “The less power he’s got, the bigger illusions he builds — rather like my gallant prime minister, Mr Blair, if you want my opinion.”
This political jibe is not the only one in the book. Le Carre describes “Absolute Friends” as “a piece of political science fiction” aimed at showing “what could happen if we allow present trends to continue to the point of absurdity where corporate media are absolutely at the beck and call in the United States of a neoconservative group which is commanding the political high ground, calling the shots and appointing the State of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy”.
Completed in Cornwall on June 9 and due to be published next month, the novel can barely contain the 72-year-old writer’s fury about the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, his contempt for Blair and what he calls America’s “neoconservative junta”. In the acknowledgments he thanks John Pilger for his “words of wisdom over dinner”, while anti-globalization campaigners Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, Noam Chomsky and George Monbiot are name-checked in the text. The novel’s rage is muted compared with Le Carre’s remarks during BBC Radio 4’s Today program interview this week. Then he sounded more like Harold Pinter in full flow than the suave, meticulous creator of labyrinthine spy novels. He compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist, Victor Klemperer, who hid from the Nazis during World War II in a cellar in Dresden, waiting for the good Germans to return, saying: “I’m waiting for the real Americans to come back.”
But he reserved his bitterest bile for Blair. “To me,” he told James Naughtie, “there’s no bigger sin that a politician can commit than allowing his country to go to war under false pretences.”
Le Carre, real name David Cornwell and a former master at Eton College, ascribed Blair’s failings to his education: “I think that the extremely old-fashioned schools such as Fettes (in his day, anyway) leave marks of puritanism and deformation.”
His views exasperated some. The Daily Telegraph’s Daniel Johnson said that having pensioned off his trusty spook Smiley a decade ago, Le Carre is bereft of a worthwhile muse, and has chanced on the alleged madness of Bush’s America as a surrogate. Le Carre, he argued, is hopelessly out of his depth when attempting to analyze the Iraq war. For Johnson, he has created an absurd topography that bears little relation to the real world. In “Absolute Friends” the villains “are no longer KGB spymasters but those who defeated them,” writes Johnson. “The West is the new Eastern bloc. Loyalty to the Atlantic alliance is the new treachery.”
In “Absolute Friends”, though, the West is hardly the new Eastern bloc, but disastrously split: Mundy, for all his union flag, is dismayed to find himself sharing the anti-war perspective of such Western countries as Germany and France. Mundy is a Le Carre hero inflamed anew with ideological fervor, this time to help counter propaganda for the Iraqi war. But Johnson is right about one thing: The Atlantic alliance is hardly viewed by Le Carre through rose-tinted glasses.
“Anglo-American relations, though, are something Le Carre has always had fun with,” says screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft, who adapted “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” into a successful 1979 television series starring Alec Guinness as Smiley.
“Ever since “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” in 1963, right through to “The Russia House” in 1989, he’s always entertainingly explored the tensions between us and our American cousins.” In “Absolute Friends”, too, Mundy renews a delightful verbal sparring match with a CIA agent.
Le Carre’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, also detects continuities between Le Carre’s pre— and post-Cold War novels. “When one thinks about David’s books,” he says, “what comes out is a very patriotic man. I think his patriotism includes the whole concept of democracy and responsible political behavior and with regard to his new novel I guess he would assume that the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes aren’t up to those standards.” “Absolute Friends” is about loyalty and duplicity, idealism and compromise, treachery and betrayal, but so are all his novels.
David Cornwell was born in Poole in 1931, the son of Ronnie Cornwell, a swindler who served time for fraud. He persuaded his father to send him to school in Switzerland after reportedly feigning a nervous breakdown at Sherborne school, which he detested.
It has been claimed that he became fascinated by espionage when he met an English diplomat in Switzerland. After graduating with a first in modern languages from Lincoln college, Oxford, in 1956, he became a tutor in French and German for two years at Eton before joining the Foreign Office, working in West Germany, where he rose to be consul in Hamburg and also worked for the intelligence services.
For decades he has denied he was a spy during this time, though reportedly he was betrayed to the Soviets as a spy by Kim Philby. It was in the operational section of MI5 that he met the crime novelist John Bingham (the pen, and family, name of Lord Clanmorris), who encouraged him to write.
“When I first began writing, Ian Fleming was riding high and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could have affairs with women, drive a fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry to escape,” Le Carre once wrote.
“The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”’s protagonist, Alec Leamas, had none of these Bondesque accoutrements: He was a dour spy in the chilly hell of post-war Germany. There could be no pussy galore for him, no excursions into Martini preparation. What impressed JB Priestley, Graham Greene and others was the ingenuity of his plot construction. “When I was adapting Tinker, Tailor I found it immensely complicated, dazzling and bewildering,” says Hopcraft. “It was very difficult to construct a sequential narrative from that mind-boggling story. I tried to keep the mischievous quality of his writing. I regard him above all as a very witty, elegant lord of misrule.”
That adaptation sealed Le Carre’s fame in Britain during the 80s, but he refused to capitalize on that celebrity by accepting a new year’s honor from Margaret Thatcher. A clue as to why, no doubt, can be found in “Absolute Friends”, where Mundy recalls the Falklands War: “He’d been ordered by our Leaderene (Thatcher) to rejoice at the sinking of (the Argentine ship) the Belgrano. He’d nearly vomited.”
Perhaps the roots of Le Carre’s current radicalism lie in the Thatcher era? “I don’t think so,” says Alvarez. “Whatever else David is, he isn’t an old lefty.”
His politics are more interesting. “Since ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ in 1983, he’s had very clear sympathies with the Arab world, and that’s led to false accusations of anti-Semitism,” says Hopcraft. “Because of that sympathy he would have found the Iraq business irresistible.”
It’s significant that Mundy’s wife in “Absolute Friends” is a Turkish Muslim. Those Arab sympathies led him to criticize Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam in “The Satanic Verses”. This precipitated a literary feud in 1997 in which Rushdie called Le Carre a pompous ass who had sympathized with the Islamists seeking to murder him, while Le Carre retorted: “The pain he has had to endure is appaling, but it doesn’t make a martyr of him nor — much as he would like it to — does it sweep away argument about the ambiguities of his participation in his own downfall.”
Many of Le Carre’s post-Cold War novels, such as “The Night Manager” and “Our Game”, dealt with the legacy of espionage, but none of these books could have prepared us for his best-received recent book, “The Constant Gardener”, a thriller which was among other things a coruscating polemic against pharmaceutical companies and their impact on Africa.
Hopcraft sees him as a spy writer who’s came into the limelight, if belatedly. “In recent years he’s become less private and prepared to tackle political issues in public. Now he likes a public scrap, but he doesn’t take on pygmies. He’s tackling some of the most important issues there are.”
