The Delicacy of Conveying The Truth

John Le Carre’s New Take on a Cruel Business

Oh to be at the height of your creative powers in your eighties. John Le Carre, who published his first novel in 1961 at the age of 31, has just written his latest – and one of his best – at the age of 81.

A Delicate Truth returns Le Carre to the haunts he knew as a young man: the layered, deviousness of the British Secret Service and the imperfections of life. Le Carre is a writer of the first order, not an author of spy novels or a purveyor of thrillers. Not for him the glib gimcrackery of implausible weapons, sexual encounters with Slovenian ice-maidens and impossible escapes by hang-glider. There is nothing romantic about his world – last made widely visible by Gary Oldham’s portrayal of Le Carre’s best known character, George Smiley, in the 2011 movie, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Le Carre’s plumbs the depths of the human spirit. The colors of his universe, wreathed in shadows, are umber, ochre and slate. Betrayal, deceit, underhanded dealings, the worship of false gods and the forlorn pettiness of man are the themes that have pre-occupied him since his early work, The Spy Came in From the Cold (mordantly inseparable from the character portrayed by Richard Burton in the cinematic version) set the standard by which so many of his subsequent works have been judged.

The superficial essence of A Delicate Truth (an arms-running plot off Gibraltar that goes badly awry) is nothing but a thin camouflage for the main event – the ethical battle facing a 30-something secret service officer Toby Bell, seeking to navigate his way through the political thicket of a complicated organization, who discovers that his mentors and superiors are men of a dubious nature. Le Carre’s government operatives have the disposition and instinct for self-preservation of civil servants. They could just as easily have led obscure lives in the ministration of health or environmental services, as in the departments of secrecy and skullduggery.

This is the world that Le Carre knows. In a revealing introduction, he notes that some of his recent books have taken him to less familiar pastures – the entanglements of Russian mobsters with the City of London or the Turkish-Germans of Bremen involved in a plot to abduct an Al Qaeda paymaster. These journeys to foreign lands, and more particularly the inner emotions of his characters, made it difficult for him to convey the subtleties and nuances on which his craft rests. A Delicate Truth brings Le Carre home. Here he works within his own skin.

Toby Bell could be a reincarnation of the younger Le Carre, now a half-century removed from his own short, stint in the British secret service. Bell is eager, ambitious, brimming with idealism, still shedding the innocence of the young and just learning to skim the surface of the dark, unreflecting pond of human motives.

Bell uncovers an illicit scheme, masterminded by a dubious, British government minister that involves a clandestine militia squad, financed by a right wing American group, seeking to abduct a middle-eastern terrorist in the waters off Gibraltar. This being Le Carre and not Ian Fleming, the abduction goes awry, innocents are killed and the subsequent cover-up embroils others British officials in an unsavory mess.

Young Bell smells a rat – actually several rats – and begins to gradually assemble evidence that implicates men he previously considered mentors or father figures.

There is nothing joyous or racy about this uncloaking. Bell interviews bit players in the failed plot and becomes dangerously curious about the murder and whistle-stop cremation of one of its members.

Bell shucks off attempts to buy his silence with the prospect of a cushy life in one of those consultancies that operate - as we have all earned in recent days – on the fringes of government. Bell has assembled his case and is moving in for the kill when he himself is set upon by thugs and savagely beaten. This Le Carre tale officially ends amid a whirl of emergency sirens and the ambiguity of life in the shadows. The unofficial story continues: it is Le Carre’s disappointment that the world which emerged from the ugliness of the Cold War, in which he idealistically soldiered many years ago, has not become a better place.

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