Ambiguously nostalgic reading: "A Delicate Truth” by John le Carré

My heart wasn’t really in this post. A Delicate Truth was the tail end of my holiday reading in Australia, not however completed until well after being thrown back into the frenzy of the rentrée. It duly got finished bittily, rather than in the quick but substantial bursts appropriate to a book like this. Moreover, all this was a while ago, meaning the novel has faded rather from my memory.

Was it a bad book? Actually not at all, with some critics describing it as something of a return to form for Le Carré. I was unaware that he was particularly out of form, except inasmuch as his Cold War glory days (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) are growing ever more distant, though the Constant Gardener was of course a bit of a hit more recently. Over time, I have dipped into Le Carré’s recent novels mainly for lightish relief, often in the form of audio books on long journeys (always read by the author himself, a job he does very well, by the way).

Such was the spirit in which I undertook this book, boosted by a couple of positive reviews in Sunday newspapers.

The novel is contemporary, or near-contemporary, and amounts essentially to a cri de coeur against the modern way of spying. The world depicted is an all-too-believable one of national security outsourced to questionable transatlantic private-sector consultants and mercenaries pursuing operations at the behest of shady and unaccountable interests. The baddies here are slimy overpaid middle-men with sleek manners, fundamentalist American ideologues with clout in Washington and more money than judgement, self-aggrandising, gullible and ambitious New Labour politicians, Whitehall functionaries for whom moral ambiguity has become a creed and soldiers who sell their scruples for the neocon dollar. The goodies are the decent Englishmen and women who gradually awake to the manipulation to which they are subject, the honourable fighting man determined to serve his country rather than the self-interested abstractions and compromises of the War on Terror and the civil servant with the courage to act against his better judgement.

Geddit? It’s not bad as an outraged moral deconstruction of the War on Terror and the compromises it brings, but it is, shall we say, not particularly nuanced in its characterisations. Goodies and baddies are goodies and baddies in a way you would not have found in the world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It is hard to resist the thought that La Carré rather hankers after the rather more picturesque and, well, quintessentially English moral ambiguities of an earlier age, when public school educated gentlemen betrayed each other for ideological (or at least personal) rather than inelegant pecuniary reasons. There is a sense of implicit yearning for a bygone age. We find this especially in the leading character, Sir Kit, a once “low-flying” career diplomat, projected to the glories of a knighthood and a cushy pre-retirement ambassadorial posting, who is appalled to learn that his elevation was based on his role in an operation he believed to be honourable service to his country, but later found to have been a botched extraordinary rendition, which not only failed to catch the presumed terrorist but also produced a couple of entirely innocent victims, a fact subsequently covered up by the new Establishment, less, it seems, out of fear of shame and scandal than for concern over disrupting lucrative income streams.

Perhaps I am asking too much. La Carré spins a fine yarn, and one does follow its twist and turns with some pleasure. You can also imagine this book as a not bad film thriller at some point, but when it comes to my usual recommendation, I’d be as inclined to suggest waiting for the film as reading the book now.