There’s a scene in John Le Carre’s “The Little Drummer Girl” that’s spellbinding. Some 40 pages long, it involves a small group of people sitting around a table talking. Despite the complete lack of action, it’s riveting.
As the heroine of the story is by turns browbeat, bribed, educated and seduced as a plot is laid out for her, and for us. Then in a hurry follows the unfolding, or unravelling, of all that’s come before. This is where Le Carre really excels, and why the temptation to lump him in with the likes of Tom Clancy needs to be resisted.
In “A Most Wanted Man” the action, such as it is, is almost an afterthought. What’s really going on is the intra- and inter-agency squabbles, the political considerations of governments thousands of miles away, the histories — to the extent one can really be sure — of the characters. All of that goes into the fleshing out of the scheme; its denouement is simply where you are shocked to find out what went wrong.
There’s definitely no Clancy-esque gadgetry to speak of. The interest is in the people, not the toys they play with.
Le Carre sets multiple tables for us. There’s a love triangle; a slew of intelligence agencies (“Remember that we fight a common enemy: each other”); an illegitimate and half-sane Chechen orphan; a banker who has inherited a closetful of skeletons; and by the way a plot to funnel millions of dollars to a terrorist organization. Some of the tables are turned, some are ignored. None are fully resolved, and several of the main characters are left at the end literally standing on a street corner staring at each other, trying to figure out what just happened.
What makes it all so good is the writing. His prose has always been concise and elegant, descriptive, witty and sardonic, and here he’s really outdone himself. There are paragraphs that I read several times through just to savor the layers of meaning accomplished with a minimal amount of words.
“I see.” He didn’t.
For a little while after the breakup of the eastern bloc, it seemed as though the master of the east/west spy novel may have had the rug pulled out from beneath him. Not so; his new love is the friction between the west, what’s left of the former Soviet republics, and middle eastern terrorists. It’s a beautiful relationship.
Give it a try.