The great moment in the winding down of the cold war came in 1989, the reality of its ending right there on television, live from Berlin: that wall, that brutal symbol of brutal politics, being smashed to pieces by ecstatic Berliners, with pickaxes, with sledge hammers, with bare hands if that was all they had. The Iron Curtain was a metaphor, but the wall was real concrete, and there it went, and thank heaven. This was bad news only for a legion of
Communist bureaucrats — though not quite all of them, it turned out — and also, in a very small corner of the world, the toilers in fiction. Well, too bad, but if that was the price to be paid for the joyous parade of stuttering Trabbies streami into the West, so be it.
Cold war spy fiction had had its day, and it had been, for a generation of readers on airplanes and beaches, a very good day indeed. Len Deighton, Derek Marlowe, Charles McCarry and, at the top of the heap, the magnificent John le Carré, most notably in his Karla trilogy: “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People.” The great character of the trilogy was the meek, brilliant George Smiley, a character le Carré had used before but here was his full flowering. And if his reality on the page was compelling, his rendering in human form — by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s two miniseries, adapted from “Tinker, Taylor” and “Smiley’s People” — made him even more real. You reread the books, and visualized Sir Alec. Perfect.
Le Carré went forward, right through “The Russia House,” in 1989, where a good-hearted civilian, the publisher Barley Blair, is caught up in the battles of amoral spies in a never-ending war. The motto on the family crest of that novel was “A plague on both your houses,” because, by now, le Carré was angry at the whole spy business, a big, bureaucratic sausage machine that ground up innocent civilians to no good purpose.
What had always driven le Carré’s novels was anger, moral anger, stirred by the political reality of the moment, then written from a particularly seductive point of view. If the spy wars of the later 20th century were fought in “a wilderness of mirrors,” beset by paradox and moral uncertainty — evil done in the name of good — then John le Carré, or, rather, the narrative voice that went by the name John le Carré, was the perfect choice to polish those mirrors. It was the voice of the urbane, upper-class Englishman: courteous, opaque and chilly, with a ruthless, penetrative intellect and razor wit for the delivery of its insights.
And could he write! Past tense, present tense, talks to his characters, funny one minute, wildly emotional the next, leaping from plot point to plot point and leaving out all the dumb stuff the reader knew anyhow. Under his hand, the genre had grown, had reached heights it had never known before. But, by 1990, gone. “The Secret Pilgrim” was a retrospective novel, looking back at the cold war. Then, by 1993, le Carré wrote “The Night Manager,” aimed at arms dealing, a kind of replacement villainy. There followed a few strange, uncomfortable novels — “The Constant Gardener,” “Absolute Friends,” “The Mission Song” — the passionate anger now turned on faceless corporations and their victims. No more evil in the name of good, now just obscene greed; and the chemistry didn’t work. “Actually,” people said, “I haven’t read it.”
But then, something changed. And, coincidentally, a few weeks after the cold war sat up in its coffin and smiled, John le Carré publishes one of the best novels he’s ever written. Maybe the best, it’s possible. What the hell got into him? Well, not quite 9/11, more its aftermath.
“A Most Wanted Man” is the story of a young fugitive, half Chechen,