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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Book Review | A Delicate Truth
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Book Review | A Delicate Truth

The master of spy fiction returns with a tale about terror and shifts in the global order

A photograph of le Carré dating back to the 1960s. Photo: Terry Fincher/Express/Getty ImagesPremium
A photograph of le Carré dating back to the 1960s. Photo: Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images

A Delicate Truth | John le Carré

Feared creatures

Shortly after the identities of the Boston bombers were revealed, Yassin Musharbash, a Berlin-based journalist, tweeted, “I had the privilege of assisting John le Carré as a researcher as he wrote A Most Wanted Man, a novel about a Chechen Terror suspect… I am thinking about this book a lot these days. It asks a lot of very valid questions, even in today’s context."

He wasn’t alone. While #Chechnya trended on Twitter, users pointed to le Carré’s novels Our Game (1995) and A Most Wanted Man (2008), due to be released as a movie this year, as examples of the novelist’s prescience.

It wasn’t just about subject matter. At 81, le Carré seems to have acquired an unparalleled understanding of the amorphous nature of global terrorism: a narrative not limited to systems or organizations, one wherein corporate interests are entwined with those of mercenaries, shady political action groups and the whims of multi billionaires, where the actions of an individual cannot be predicted by class, race, place of birth, education or bank balance.

Set over three years, le Carré’s new novel, A Delicate Truth, charts an attempt by a retired civil servant, Sir Christopher Probyn, and a promising young foreign office recruit, Toby Bell, to uncover the truth behind the botched experiment in extraordinary rendition that killed a Muslim woman and her baby daughter. A mission carried out at the shadiest extremities of government cognizance.

A Delicate Truth: Penguin/Viking, 311 pages, Rs 399
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A Delicate Truth: Penguin/Viking, 311 pages, Rs 399

Le Carré understands that today, more than ever, terror depends on the unpredictability of the individual actor.

But then, le Carré’s heroes have always been “solitary deciders" who must break out of the system to complete their private missions. From George Smiley (a “solitary man in search of completion") to A Perfect Spy’s Magnus Pym to Tommy Brue in A Most Wanted Man, his heroes are lone operators, as are their nemeses.

As early as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), the archetypal le Carré protagonist Alec Leamas meets “failure as he would one day probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary". An early draft of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy began with the image of “a solitary and embittered man living alone on a Cornish cliff, staring up at a single black car as it wove down the hillside towards him".

As in the novels of his literary predecessor Graham Greene, acts of solitary moral courage in le Carré are balanced against acts of solitary moral depravity, and it can be difficult to distinguish the two. He has described his vision of real heroism as a virtue that does not depend on “conformity or even patriotism"and A Delicate Truth expands on that position. In a recent profile in The New York Times, le Carré said of espionage today: “It’s a different world, multiethnic and amazing. Brown faces, black faces, white faces and absolutely classless by appearance."

A Delicate Truth is strikingly cinematic. Scenes cut away swiftly, and televisual geographic shifts serve to continue the narrative.

One episode, in particular, seems written for big-screen adaptation: The two protagonists sit together in a Cornish rainstorm as Probyn repeats the testimony of an ex-soldier, Jeb, told to him the previous week in his London club. Seamlessly, the voice of Jeb the Welshman shifts into that of the retired diplomat. In turn, the questions posed by Bell become those asked in the club by Probyn, as the two night-time conferences converge and the reader is held in a trembling chordal balance of four voices telling the same story.

This “different world" of A Delicate Truth is deftly and delicately layered, full of allusions to older warfare as it builds us a picture of the present. Its two heroes are versions of each other, mirrored across the divide between the old order and the new. Through them, le Carré superimposes the Cold War era of his early writing on to the post-New Labour era of today.

Le Carré’s characters have lived through the Northern Ireland crisis, World War II and the George Bush-Tony Blair Iraq invasion, allowing the veteran novelist to draw on a 60-year-deep vein of experience to tell us about the things we fear the most in our contemporary world.

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Published: 18 May 2013, 12:06 AM IST
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