Days when every shrub poses a threat

A man alone in a room, waiting in the gloom, unnervingly still, watching the clock on the wall. On the wall behind the man, the man’s shadow hovers close, doubling him, looming, succubus-like, ready to follow the man when, once the clock strikes six, he rises from that chair and leaves Lembridge Asylum.

What story shall we tell? One of the truly delicious things about the opening moments of Ministry of Fear (1944) is that it’s so saturated with forbidding mood and transfixing ambiguity that it seems it could go anywhere, could become any number of stories. The story that it does become, one of geopolitical intrigue, deadly pursuit, paranoia, betrayal, mystery pastry, and guilt, is dizzyingly dense with plot—and with plots—and, to my eyes and ears, a deeply satisfying, dream-like suspense film. Certain elements are very much of the time, with Nazis aplenty, yet the film feels out of time, of any time—its eeriness is timeless. Oddly enough, you get the impression that this timelessness, this careful drawing upon anxiogenic symbols from the collective unconscious, is precisely what Graham Greene, whose novel provided the film with its source material, didn’t like. And he claimed that Fritz Lang, the film’s director, didn’t like it either. Perhaps because, at that time, it seemed so important to make Ministry of Fear, like Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), an explicitly anti-Nazi picture—Lang was a self-exiled German—and the film’s Nazis simply weren’t Nazi enough: no secret chambers adorned with swastika flags or giant portraits of the Führer, no maniacal speeches about world domination. Fair enough, I suppose. But what we have in the place of a rallying cry for the Allies is a wildly evocative, exquisitely designed, utterly entertaining nightmare. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

That man in the room is Stephen Neale. One of the first people he encounters is a fortune-teller, who seems to be waiting for him. She wants to talk about the women in his past, something that makes him very uncomfortable—Neale did time in Lembridge after being found guilty of “mercy killing” his ailing wife. Neale’s played by Ray Milland, one of those rare stars who could easily be the hero or the heavy, whose every gesture is perfectly gauged so as to draw us in and alternately earn our sympathies and prompt us to question his reliability. Against the advice of his doctor, Neale opts to head straight to London upon release. A bustling city, and a place upon which bombs could fall at any moment—talk about ominous. Everything in Ministry of Fear is ominous, from the weird din of boisterous laughter that Neale finds in certain crowds to the séance in which the medium speaks directly to him, from the perpetual fog to the sculpted shrubbery to the ladies large-brimmed translucent hats. Lang, as responsible for ushering German expressionism into Hollywood cinema as anyone, accents the unease by keeping the characters most often in the middle distance (that trademark dearth of point-of-view), and by not relying on the musical score in key moments of tension. So many of the film’s scenes are so compellingly strange: a blind man cane-tapping his way through a curtain of steam; two grown men eating cake without plates or cutlery on a train; a carpet of Englishmen sleeping on the floor of a tube station bomb shelter; a tailor (Dan Duryea) dialing a telephone with a giant pair of scissors. Every moment promises something new, some development that might change the course of everything. It’s almost surreal. But haven’t you had days like this? 

            

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.