Le Carre's Last Stand: Agent Running in the Field

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

Viking

Pp. 281

The last book that John Le Carré wrote is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a fast-paced action with a clear story and credible characters. Themes of espionage, defection and loyalty may have seemed passé, but nationalism and protectionism are once again current: the old enemy is back, reinvented as the new enemy and we may need to defend our nation and concepts of freedom and democracy all over again from plutocrats like Putin. The novel is crammed full of code names and secret spy business, played out against a backdrop of Brexit, Trump and greedy oligarchs in a contemporary environment.

Nat is a forty-seven-year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service who plays badminton and lives a pleasant and seemingly settled life in London with his wife, Prue, who does pro bono legal work for worthy causes. He is somehow manoeuvred into playing badminton at his exclusive private club against a young upstart, Edward Shannon, who has ideas, and he is not afraid to expound them. With an older mentor’s indulgent attitude, Nat finds himself looking forward to these meetings, although the book is written in retrospect as he reflects upon them.

The premise is that Trump has helped to engineer Brexit so that Britain has to rely on Russia for financial and political assistance, which is obviously going to be grubby, and be beholden to the USA once again. Tellingly, Trump does Putin’s dirty work for him: “pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.”

There may possibly be “an Anglo-American covert operation already in the planning stage with the dual aim of undermining the social democratic institutions of the European Union and dismantling our international trading tariffs.” This operation will also “disseminate fake news on a large scale in order to aggravate existing differences between member states of the Union.” One former spy is horrified to think that he risked his life to see the Great British Empire, liberal conscience and Christian values replaced by “a cartload of hypocritical horseshit”. In present circumstances, division and in-fighting will not be difficult to engineer.

The language of spies follows form: a newspaper in which hand determines whether it is safe to talk or not; letters written suggest the opposite of what is declared. There is, however, a refreshing respect for women, which is often absent from male hard-boiled thrillers. The novel is elevated by its use of witty and decisive one-liners to describe characters and actions. For example, one high-ranking official has a “cheery port-and-pheasant voice”, while another “doesn’t do confrontation, which is something we both know. His life is a sideways advance between things he can’t face.”

At 281 pages the novel is shorter than many of Le Carré’s previous heavyweight thrillers, but it is engrossing and entertaining, packed with set pieces, old tropes and new angles. We live in a world of surveillance and, while anyone may express almost anything on the surface, there are people watching our utterances and manipulating our movements, biding their time until we can become useful to support a pet project. Gripping stuff.

Gathering Swallows Twitter in the Skies

Autumn by Ali Smith

(Penguin), Pp. 260

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize and hailed as the first post Brexit novel, Ali Smith’s Autumn shoulders a weight of expectation for a slim novel. While it stands steady on its exquisite legs, it is also part of a series of novels due to represent all four seasons. It recalls the ode to autumn with its mists and mellow fruitfulness; there is a sense of melancholy but it is also suffused with hope, colour and a love of all things bright and beautiful.

Elisabeth Demand befriends her elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck, and slowly learns his stories, while he challenges her imagination and perceptions of society. Her mother is horrified that she chooses to spend time with an adult male and cannot conceive that it is entirely innocent. Is it? The novel flicks back and forwards through time but with helpful explanations such as ‘It was a Tuesday evening in April in 1993. Elisabeth was eight years old.’ Daniel described artworks and paintings to her, including the works of the first female pop-artist, Pauline Boty.

Elisabeth later becomes a lecturer in art history, two topics which are intrinsically intertwined. She was told by a lecturer that there were no female pop artists and she is determined to champion Pauline Boty, who refused to fit the boxes created for female artists and died prematurely in 1966. With her witty collages and subversive paintings, Boty becomes a symbol of all those who are “Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum.” Time is fluid; it is linear but cyclical; very messy and frequently repetitive. Now Daniel is in a nursing-home coma and Elisabeth visits him, pretending to be family: he has erotic fantasies about which she will never know. He had experiences of the Holocaust, and there are clear parallels drawn between the treatment of foreigners then and now.

It is self-consciously literary and also aware of the cyclical nature of history. From the opening line – “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” – it is clear that everyone is feeling unsettled as the country tears itself apart.

“All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing… All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing.”

Britain has just voted to leave the EU. Half of the village isn’t talking to the other half. A mysterious barbed-wired compound has sprung up nearby complete with security cameras and patrolling guards. Elisabeth’s mother, who is obsessed with antiques, decides to get herself arrested by throwing items of historic significance at the enclosure, “bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times”. A house in which immigrants live has the words GO HOME spray-painted on the wall. But later, the words, WE ALREADY ARE HOME, THANK YOU have been added, and bouquets of flowers left by supporters and well-wishers. There are seeds of hope and humanity scattered in this forlorn and morally bereft landscape.

Ali Smith acknowledges the pain of division and the beauty of inclusion. From nature with its seemingly haphazard approach to procreation and fertility, to the apparent clinical approach to grammar and semantics, she suggests that organic development will always triumph over control. Daniel dreams of becoming imprisoned in a tree and returning to the earth. Smith admires the polyglot of languages with words coming from all over the world (such as an intriguing section on a book young Elisabeth reads about a gymkhana).

This is a time of fear and certainty based on lies and fabrications. Daniel explains that the power of the lie is “Always seductive to the powerless.” We make sense of our world through the stories we tell and the ones we hear, whether they are presented as anecdotes or news. “Whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion.” We need more inclusion; we need more acceptance; we need more open-mindedness; and we need more books by Ali Smith.