Out of the Cold, but far from out of the game: John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man

The titular figure of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is as diminutive and weary-looking as the multitude of parties wanting him are immense and powerful. His name is Issa, a vagabond with “a look of winter,” a half-Russian, half-Chechen in his early 20s. He appears right there in the novel’s wonderful first line, emaciated and brooding, an unsanctioned tourist stalking Hamburg in a black overcoat that renders him only frailer and more conspicuous. He’s, by my measure at least, a rather hysterically devout Muslim, though his humourless, righteous, half-crazed demeanour may be partly the result of illness, perhaps partly of torture, not to mention the dark, grueling journey stowed somewhere in the belly of the ship that brought him to this not altogether friendly German port. There’s also the implication that Issa might be a terrorist. Whatever the case, his presence trips alarms all over. He means many things to many people, and he promises to prove useful in many ways, some of which the reader won’t likely be able to imagine before reaching this superb thriller’s final chapter.

In interviews le Carré has said that as a young man he invested institutions with the qualities he’d have liked to find in parents. It’s a rich observation, not only for what it tells us about le Carré—the institution he refers to being British intelligence, for whom he was once a bonafide spook—nor just the latent desire for authorities to whom we may submit, but for what it says about the persistent nature of patriarchy: in whichever form it takes, it seems ever the foil of the more worrisome heroes of fiction. And in le Carré’s milieu, there’s always reason to worry.

No less than three of the central characters in A Most Wanted Man, the three we can come closest to calling heroes, perform vital actions dictated by a troubling paternal legacy. Issa is the unhappy beneficiary of a tremendous sum left to him by a dead father he loathes. Brue, the affable, 60-year-old Scottish proprietor of a Hamburg bank, finds himself obliged to aid Issa due to the compromising legacy of his own father, whose business of financial management, both in its legitimate and crooked forms, Brue has carried on in his perfunctory fashion. Annabel, the young, idealistic, but very smart and more than capable activist lawyer who takes Issa’s case, struggles with the fact that for all her overt, deep-seated rebellion, she too has taken on the same vocation as her father, perhaps as a method of somehow doing good through the very same means her father used to do ill. These uneasy relationships to their respective dads is just about all these three really have in common, but, in le Carré’s inspired stratagem, it’s enough to tether their fates together.

Some claim the end of the Cold War left certain writers in limbo, le Carré most of all, seeing how the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold practically made the tangled web of Cold War intelligence his personal literary domain. But the novels that sprung up in the wake of what Francis Fukuyama zealously called the end of history followed their natural patterns, with le Carré turning his attention to multinational corporations, for one, in The Constant Gardener. That the war on terror should now loom over A Most Wanted Man comes as no surprise, and le Carré responds to its new world order with considerable vigor and insight, recognizing how the West’s current bogeyman might be seen as even more ubiquitous and unpredictable than the communists were, thus granting intelligence agencies tacit license to be still more ruthless. In a blackly humorous bit of anti-terror double-think, le Carré has one intelligence official explain to another how a terror suspect is that much more likely to be a jihadi for the very fact that he does not behave like a jihadi. And in a nice tip of the hat to his past work, le Carré sets this new tale in the same country that once marked the Cold War’s ideological frontier, and in the very city that was once home to Mohamed Atta.

As pessimistic as le Carré can be toward institutions, he remains, like his most notable forbearer Graham Greene, a true believer in individuals. Issa may be to the end a bit of a headache, an enigmatic centerpiece and all-purpose pawn too fanatical for the author to bother peering very deeply into, but le Carré is more than generous in his texturing of both Annabel, who for all her altruistic illusions is not condescended to, and Brue, who seems to be the character closest in spirit—as well as in age—to the author. “A lonely rich man in late life, still looking for the dignity of love” is how Annabel describes Brue, and the description is genuinely tender. It also starts to allude to the fundamental weaknesses of such essentially ordinary characters in the face of unfathomable power—for all our better intentions and beliefs, when our back’s against the wall, most of us simply do what we’re told. The world of A Most Wanted Man, controlled by the ostensibly diplomatic interests of at least three governments, each having very big fists, is not a forgiving one. It is harsh, and it thinks nothing of consuming lives to forward its goals. Which is to say that, Cold War be damned, this is still the world of spy fiction. “Don’t go soft on me,” one German operative warns another, “there’s no room for it in this operation.” “ Tell me one where there was,” slyly counters the other. There is, of course, no response to be had for that. And that, I’m guessing, is why we keep reading.