Review by New York Times Review
"I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral," George Smiley said in John le Carré's 1974 classic, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." "Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the center of things." This concept of necessary, if lamentable, sacrifice in the face of the Soviet monolith helped define the espionage masterpieces of the cold war. Such statements gave fans a rush of pleasure, partly aesthetic, partly clandestine the feeling they were gaining a bit of secret Machiavellian wisdom. Times changed. The Soviet empire morphed from our sworn enemy into a sordid kleptocracy with whom business could be done, and le Carré turned his attention more fully to the West, which has always been his real subject. The enemies (big pharma, bent banks, blackhearted multinationals and the weak-willed politicians they buy) became less exotic. The old sacrifices of lives, and of our own ethics became less necessary. Many critics grew irritated. What happened to the particular pleasure of John le Carré's moral relativism? "A Delicate Truth," like most of le Carré's recent novels, feels like a rebuttal to George Smiley's theory. How many stray cats can we allow to be snuffed in order to reach our ends? Or, as le Carré put it in an essay in last month's issue of Harper's, "How far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?" Back in 1963, in "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," we watched that novel's stray cat, Liz Gold, die on the Berlin Wall. A shame, yes, but in the grand scheme of things an acceptable loss. Fifty years later, "A Delicate Truth" suggests that even little Liz Gold would be too much of a sacrifice. We open in 2008, when a servant of the Crown known to us only by his cover name, Paul Anderson, is going a bit mad waiting in a hotel room in Gibraltar. He's been sent to be the eyes and ears of Fergus Quinn, M.P., during Operation Wildlife, which aims to exfiltrate a terrorist visiting the British Crown Colony. Wildlife is a joint endeavor between Quinn and a private American security firm called Ethical Outcomes, which "will be providing the full American-style coverage." Once he's finally in the field, Paul realizes that "war's gone corporate." Although he sees little of the action, he's told the maneuver went off without a hitch a great secret success, for which Paul will later, under his real name, Christopher (Kit) Probyn, be awarded a commissionership in the Caribbean and a knighthood. We next meet Toby Bell, formerly employed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and later private secretary to the "Honorable" (a title that drips with irony) Fergus Quinn, during the period leading up to Wildlife. Toby is the idealist in the room, for he wishes "to make a difference or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country's discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-cold-war world." A friend from the Treasury gives him and us a reminder of what this new world looks like: "We're clever and nice, but we're understaffed and underpaid and we want the best for our country, which is old-fashioned of us. New Labour loves Big Greed, and Big Greed has armies of amoral lawyers and accountants on the make and pays them the earth to make rings round us. We can't compete; they're too big to fail and too big to fight. Now I've depressed you. Good. I'm depressed too." Toby may be depressed, but he hasn't quite lost his idealism. Once he realizes his minister is hiding something important from him, he begins to dig until he uncovers some of the machinations and personal interplay that are leading inexorably to Operation Wildlife. He even meets the leaders of Ethical Outcomes, a dodgy British operative named Jay Crispin and Mrs. Spencer Hardy of Houston, Tex., "better known to the world's elite as the one and only Miss Maisie." Toby recognizes what Paul/Kit does not: namely that a government minister is embarking on a private military op with the help of mercenaries. Alarmed, Toby shares the news with a trusted ear, but he is working in a sphere in which no good act goes unpunished, and so it goes for him. These events form the prologue for the action that takes place three years later when a member of the British Special Forces assigned to Wildlife unexpectedly confronts Sir Christopher Probyn Kit in the midst of his idyllic retirement in North Cornwall. He's come to share the darker facts of Wildlife, the operation Kit still holds on to with secret pride, his great act of derring-do for the nation. The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision once Toby Bell returns, and by the time he's joined by Kit's alluring daughter the story settles into classic conspiracy thriller territory, the two of them racing to assemble evidence before they can be silenced by the men who pull the strings. As ever, le Carré's prose is fluid, carrying the reader toward an inevitable yet nail-biting climax. This is John le Carré's 23rd novel, and neither prolificacy nor age (he's 81) has diminished his legendary and sometimes startling gift for mimicry. More than the inventory of closely observed outfits, chronicles of public schools and slumped, bookish frames, it's the voices that give the characters in "A Delicate Truth" their most immediate claim to three-dimensionality. With, however, one exception: Miss Maisie, Ethical Outcomes' down-home right-wing zillionaire, with a mouthful of accent and affectation to match. Her appearance among the sophisticates of the Foreign Ministry is like a slap in the face, and while she's ushered offstage quickly, you'd be forgiven for seeing in her caricature evidence of the accusation leveled at le Carré regularly these days: anti-Americanism. Having lived in Europe for the last decade, I'm particular about how to use that label. To me, "anti-American" means just that: to be contemptuous of Americans, one and all. I've met those people. Blinded by their ignorance, they're to be scorned. But then there is John le Carré, whose January 2003 argument against the Iraq war, printed in The Times of London, was called "The United States of America Has Gone Mad." He made his ire plain: he was against the foreign policy of an American administration he despised. If this is what qualifies him, then half of our own population is anti-American. The enemy in le Carré's universe, both fictional and not, isn't America. It's the virus of shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the "post-imperial, post-cold-war world" Toby Bell so wants to help shape. And while the few Americans in "A Delicate Truth" are not to be loved, their British counterparts are even more despicable, particularly the New Labour politicians who have clearly disappointed le Carré the most deeply, having marched willingly with America into Iraq. Describing a posting to Cairo early in Toby's diplomatic career, le Carré writes: "At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the superrich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city's edge." Here is le Carré with the gloves off, turning his back entirely on George Smiley's old stray cat theory and aiming his dagger at those who would twist Smiley's words for their own purposes. Is this what we've done with our cold war victory? The spymaster-as-hero is gone, replaced by the whistle-blower, the outsider who retains enough of his heart to be appalled by the slaughter of strays. In Cairo they're the young trash collectors living on the city's edge, but in Gibraltar they're even more insignificant: one mother and her child, around whom the whole novel rotates, and for whom le Carré's rage simmers. By the end of "A Delicate Truth," you either share his anger at the injustices between its covers, or you don't. If you do, then you're one of le Carré's people. If not, you're one of Smiley's. It's up to you to decide which one is more worthy. Olen Steinhauer is the author of eight novels, most recently "An American Spy." He lives in Budapest.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 2, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Shockingly, le Carre no longer writes about moral ambiguity. Gone is any semblance of the notion that a government and its emissaries in the secret services could ever be on the side of the individual. That's been true for several novels certainly since The Constant Gardener (2001) but le Carre's latest is perhaps the most definitive statement yet of his new worldview. It starts with a 2008 counterterrorism operation, code-named Wildfire, gone wrong. A team of agents, led by a British foreign minister and a private defense contractor, was charged with capturing a terrorist on the island of Gibraltar. Billed as a rousing success, the op was, in fact, a fiasco. Three years later, a now-disgraced British agent tells the real story to retired diplomat Sir Christopher Probyn, also involved in the mission but in the dark as to what actually happened. Probyn eventually teams with Toby Bell, secretary to the minister in charge of Wildfire. Bell, also in the dark, starts digging and finds he faces a personal crisis: expose the cover-up and scuttle his career or keep quiet. Whistle-blowers risking life and livelihood to bring evil bureaucrats to their knees have long been a staple of espionage fiction. In le Carre's new world, however, evil bureaucrats never skin their knees; there are no happy endings, even attenuated ones. We commented in our 2008 review of le Carre's A Most Wanted Man (a film version of which will open in the fall) on the slow, inexorable way that, in the novel, institutional will grinds down individual lives. That grinding process is even more brutal this time around, as le Carre further establishes himself as a master of a new, shockingly realistic kind of noir in which right-thinking individuals who challenge the institutional order of things always lose. No ambiguity there but plenty of gut-wrenching tragedy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It's been nearly 50 years since le Carre broke through with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He has set the bar ever since for espionage fiction that appeals to head and heart rather than just quickening the reader's pulse.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
State-sanctioned duplicity drives bestseller le Carre's entertainingly labyrinthine if overly polemical 23rd novel, which features a corrupt British Foreign Office minister, Fergus Quinn, and an American private defense contractor "best known as Ethical Outcomes." In 2008, a cloak-and-dagger plot to capture an arms dealer in Gibraltar under the mantle of counterterrorism goes awry. Quinn's secretary, Toby Bell, who was kept out of the loop, has incriminating information about the mission and the chance to use it three years later when one of the soldiers involved ends up dead and a retired British diplomat, roped into participating against his will, tries to salve his conscience about some nasty pieces of collateral damage. As usual, le Carre (Our Kind of Traitor) tells a great story in sterling prose, but he veers dangerously close to farce and caricature, particularly with the comically amoral Americans. His best work has been about the moral ambiguity of spying, while this novel feels as if the issue of who's bad and who's good is too neatly sewn up. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As he approaches the microphone, he adjusts his tie as well as his accent, with just a hint of his Glaswegian upbringing on show, but not too much, of course. Man of the people. "Allegations have been made concerning an initiative undertaken by New Labour, supposedly in concert with the U.S. government and with the support of a fundamentalist U.S. conglomerate on the soil of gallant Gibraltar. I'm here to tell you unequivocally that no such initiative was sponsored by the British government," he lies, and takes a sip of water. Le Carre, the author of such 20th-century classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has nothing left to prove except that he can still be stung into turning out suspenseful, totally convincing political object lessons, as in his attack on the pharmaceutical industry in 2001's The Constant Gardener. His target of choice here is the mendacity of the British government and the easy camaraderie between the public and private sectors. -VERDICT This is a guaranteed hair-raising cerebral fright, especially for anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris's The Ghost or who just knows his or her email account has been hacked. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/12.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The distinguished chronicler of Cold War espionage and its costs casts his cold eye on the fog of war and its legacy when the war sets terrorists against the mercenaries and independent contractors to whom international security has been farmed out. A colorless midlevel civil servant is plucked from the anonymous ranks of the Foreign Office, given a wafer-thin cover identity as statistician Paul Anderson and packed off to Gibraltar, where he's to serve as the eyes and ears and, mainly, the yea or nay of rising Member of Parliament Fergus Quinn, who can't afford to be directly connected to Operation Wildlife. On the crucial night the forces in question are to disrupt an arms deal and grab a jihadist purchaser, both Paul and Jeb Owens, the senior military commander on the ground, smell a rat and advise against completing the operation. But they're overridden by Quinn, who says, "I recommend but do not command" that Operation Wildlife be completed. Shortly after its execution, Paul, promised "[m]edals all round," is bundled back into a plane bound for home. Sure enough, he emerges from the hush-hush affair with a knighthood and the unspoken thanks of a grateful monarch. Three years later, however, he happens to run into Jeb and hears the ruined soldier tell a decidedly less glorious story of the operation that involves extraordinary rendition, a dead mother and child, and a callous coverup. At the same time, Quinn's Private Secretary Toby Bell also becomes painfully aware of irregularities in the official record and confronts Jay Crispin, the Houston-based head of the private intelligence firm Ethical Outcomes, for answers. What he gets instead are more questions and personal danger. Resolutely keeping potential action sequences just offstage, le Carr (Our Kind of Traitor, 2010, etc.) focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence community.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
