Why I Know Better Than the New York Times

It is hard to describe the feeling I get when I hold a new John le Carre book in my hand. There is excitement for a brand new experience from my favorite author. There is an intense sense of familiarity that comes from my having read all of his twenty novels (yes, even The Naive and Sentimental Lover) since I first discovered him some ten years ago. Then there is the inescapable sense of impending loss. In several hours there will once again be no more unread le Carre novels -- in several years, perhaps there will never again be an unread le Carre novel. Born four days ago in 1931, he will not last forever, although he seems determined to write until the very end.

John le Carre made his name writing Cold War era spy novels, but he has remained resolutely contemporary taking on such issues as left-wing Palestinian terrorism and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in The Little Drummer Girl, published in 1983, the black market of international weapons sales in The Night Manager, published in 1993, and Our Game, published in 1995, unrest in the former Soviet Republics in Single & Single, published in 1999, and pharmaceutical testing abuses in The Constant Gardner, published in 2001. His newest book, The Mission Song, power brokering in the ongoing war in the Congo.

The hero of The Mission Song is Salvo, a professional interpreter, who moonlights from his regular life interpreting for international commercial conferences by interpreting for the British secret services, and who recently began moonlighting from his married life with a Congolese born nurse. He takes a job, referred to him by the British secret service, working under an assumed name for an anonymous syndicate that has arranged a secret meeting between four powerful people in the Lake Kivu region of Eastern Congo: a politician, two warlords, and a young urban boss. Asked to pretend that he can only speak English, French, and Swahili, so he can eavesdrop on the participants during breaks, Salvo becomes aware of the dirty inner workings of the syndicate's plan to preempt the upcoming elections in the Congo by placing their chosen politician in power.

The Mission Song is unlike many of le Carre's previous works in a couple of ways. First of all, it is written in the first person, something which I believe le Carre has only done once before, in The Secret Pilgrim and even then, the narrator was not really the 'main' character. Secondly, the time frame of the book is much tighter than most of his. The action takes place in a single weekend. Both of these characteristics lend the book a sense of urgency that many of his previous books haven't had: the first person asks the reader to identify with the narrator's moral plight and the immediacy of the action in the book screams to the reader that these transgressions are going on now and that each second we waste, the problems in the Congo multiply.

One of the common recent interpretations of John le Carre's career is that as he has aged, his books have lost the ambiguity that classified them during the Cold War and have becoming polemics against what he sees as the evils of the new world (dis)order. This may have some truth to it, but the critics might be missing something. The underlying message of le Carre's Cold War novels was that Ideology was dangerous and that violent or dishonest actions committed by True Believers in any ideology were not acceptable. As a result, his heroes tended to be fully aware of the dangers inherent in any ideology; since totalitarian thought was dangerous, they were flexible in their convictions. Now instead of in the name of Ideology, evil is being committed for Profit. In today's ideologically sparse landscape it is the unbelievers not the believers who are the problem. So le Carre has no reason to create his heroes to be unbelievers. The mistake is to jump to the conclusion that because le Carre himself has transformed from an unbeliever to a believer.

For those who have never read le Carre, read The Mission Song right away. If you aren't interested in Africa, read Absolute Friends. If you are like me, and you like starting new authors from their first book, pick up a copy of Call for the Dead. And if you don't like reading (although if that is the case, you probably haven't made it to this paragraph) grab a copy of The Constant Gardener from your local video store. Starring Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes, as hard as it is for me to say this, it might have made a better movie than it did a book.

"Better movie than a book" -- blogging must bring the crazy out in me.