Political rhetoric drowns message
"Absolute Friends" by John le Carre; Little Brown, hardback, $26.95
By Bob Minzesheimer
USA Today
No one writes better about the moral ambiguities of espionage, how spies think and the costs they pay for lives lived in deception than John le Carre.
But by the end of "Absolute Friends," his 19th novel, there's no question about who's good and who's evil. It concludes in a bloody fusillade with all the moral certainty of a Tom Clancy thriller, and that's a disappointment.
To be sure, le Carre is a far more eloquent writer than Clancy. Ted Mundy, the unlikely hero of "Absolute Friends," is a fully realized character, not just a plot device. A reluctant British spy, he's praised as a natural by his handlers, even if he's a Luddite when it comes to the technology of spying.
A failed writer, Mundy accidentally finds his calling in espionage, "gradually getting the hang of the family game" played by the career spies. "The failed writer is not failed after all," le Carre writes. "He is a creator like themselves. He is visiting reality, as they are, and plundering it for art's sake."
But the rest of le Carre's characters are not nearly as interesting or as credible. Too much of their dialogue turns into tiresome political rhetoric aimed at the modern imperialists: Britain and its master, the United States.
Mundy has learned about imperialism as the son of a dissolute British colonial soldier. He was born in Pakistan on the day of the disastrous partitioning of India. His mysterious mother died in childbirth.
Educated at a cruel British boarding school (are there any other kind in fiction?), Mundy never fits in. But as a self-styled radical in West Berlin in the early '60s, he makes friends with a charismatic anarchist named Sasha. It's in defense of Sasha that Mundy is savagely beaten by German police and deported.
Sasha's mistake of a lifetime is to jump over the Berlin Wall the wrong way — from West to East. He, too, is an orphan of sorts, haunted by the duplicitous politics of his father, a Nazi Lutheran minister, whom he has renounced.
In "Absolute Friends," all the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.
Suffice it to say that Mundy and Sasha will meet again and again. It's unfair to prospective readers to reveal too much of a roller-coaster plot. It involves double (and perhaps triple) agents in Cold War Germany and concludes shortly after the Iraq war, which Mundy and Sasha see as a capitalist conspiracy cheered by the corporate media.
It's hard to imagine that readers — whatever their politics — will change their worldview because of this novel. Maybe that's asking a lot of a storyteller, but it's the game le Carre is playing, and not at his best. The missed opportunity here is that he might have helped American readers understand why so many Europeans see the world differently from what we do.
