Published in 2008, this is by John Le Carre.

He's an author who pretty much guarantees you a good read (even though I still maintain that none of his later work ever quite reached the heights of the Smiley series).

This one didn't quite hit the spot for me.

It has a worthy aim. In essence it's a sustained denunciation of the vile practice of "extraordinary rendition" ("the transfer -- without legal process -- of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for the purposes of detention and interrogation") that became all too ordinary after 9/11. And it was inspired by the case of Murat Kurnaz, a totally innocent Turk who ended up in various prisons, including Guantanamo Bay, as a result of a USD-3,000 bounty. Five years. Torture. Interrogation. Life upended. To enable someone to claim the prize the US government had offered...

Le Carre pulls no punches. The Americans in the book are ghastly people. An NPR interviewer comments that the author's Americans seem to be getting worse and worse. Le Carre responds: "Because the three Americans who are sketched in are all engaged in extraordinary rendition -- and because that is a process which I regard as totally evil and wrong -- I find it very hard to make them more than two-dimensional... I really didn't feel much moral ambivalence about them."



I guess the people with whom I felt the most connection were the Hamburg-resident Turks we meet right at the beginning. Mother and son, they're struggling to reconcile their Islamic duty to take in the hungry, clearly damaged Issa with their desire to keep their heads down because they're on track to regularize their position in Germany, and don't want to blow that. In one of the cruellest details of the book, they get screwed over, and will be deported to Turkei.

So who's Issa? He's complicated. He has a Chechen mother, and a Russian father, Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov, whom Issa describes as a murderer and a rapist; despite his comparative youth, he has been jailed and tortured; he has paid to be illegally transported to Europe, and specifically wants to get to Hamburg. Because in Hamburg, he has been told, there's someone who can help him fulfil his dream to become a doctor. He knows none of the details.

Helping him to find out are two people. The first is Tommy Brue. He's middle-aged, and owns a private bank in Hamburg, which he inherited from his father. He's somewhat distanced from his wife and daughter, and desperate for meaning in his life: "Look back on my eventless life, what do I see? Escape." The second is Annabel Richter. She's a lawyer with a Hamburg non-profit that helps asylum-seekers, and she's desperate to be a saviour: "The moment I sat down with Issa and heard his story, I knew that this was where the system stops, that this was the unsavable life I must save." It turns out that what Issa is looking for is the vast amount of money deposited with Brue's father, when he was persuaded by British Intelligence to do some money-laundering for the Russian criminals streaming west after the break-up of the USSR.


In 2008, I was surveying the world from the vantage-point of Australia. We were definitely still talking about the "war on terror", but attention was diverted by the advent of Obama, and the ongoing global financial crisis

Meanwhile, sniffing around on the sidelines, is Gunther Bachmann. According to Le Carre, "He comes from the mid-levels of German intelligence... He's an extremely well-seasoned, experienced field man who knows the reality of the enemy that he's fighting, to a point, and has a very sensible take on the so-called war on terror... [He] knows that... we can't win the war on terror by dropping bombs on people or confining them in prisons." Bachmann's brief is to plant sources in the Muslim community. So, unlike the rest of the security services, who immediately define Issa as an illegal migrant and a potential bomber (Hamburg has been jumpy since its intelligence community failed to spot the machinations of 9/11-mastermind Muhammad Atta), Bachmann wants to use him to reel in one Dr Abdullah, who he thinks is financing terrorist activities. In other words, he approaches things a bit more subtly, using an old-fashioned spying approach.

You can see where all this is going. The classic looming atmosphere is there, and I enjoyed the read, but there was an element of predictability about it that made it plod rather than soar.

I felt I already knew the types each character represented: Tommy (a little washed-up and world-weary, so, of COURSE, he would start to carry a decorous little torch for Annabel); Annabel (young and idealistic -- her surname means "judge" -- so, of COURSE, she would be doing what she does partly in rebellion against her privileged background); Gunther (well-meaning, but, of COURSE, at the end of the day he'll be outplayed).

Issa was a little more difficult to read. I found him a strange character, and I struggled to connect with him. Perhaps this is deliberate. Hari Kunzru's predictably perceptive review remarks that Issa "becomes a kind of blank screen for the hopes, fears and desires of the banker, the lawyer and the spy. At times his plight makes him genuinely poignant. At others he is little more than a cipher... Issa is another incarnation of a familiar Le Carré type, the loose cannon, someone whose psychological precariousness and social disconnection make them disruptive of the established order -- and useful to the puppeteers of the human soul who run the intelligence services." Le Carre comments: "He's one of the few characters I've written about who had an original, as it were. I was in Moscow in, I think 1989, 1990, and I was running with the Chechen and the Ingush then, putting together a book about the war in the Caucasus. And I met this stringy boy who was half-Russian, half-Chechen, who was hanging out with them. And I've kind of reinvented him in this novel." For the author, Issa is "an archetype of the wretched of the earth if you like, engendered through the conflict in Chechnya, despised both by the Russians and by the Chechen, in fact, because he is neither one nor the other".

Issa carries a lot of the suspense, as you keep wondering whether his apparent naivete is somehow going to turn bad. But it seemed to me that I ought to be able to feel more for a character who had had such a bad time. And it was utterly unclear to me why Annabel would start to harbour romantic feelings for him...



Wolfson gives a great analysis of the operational conflict -- driven by opposing ideologies (foreign-service liberals versus domestic security neocons) -- and concedes that Le Carre portrays it very convincingly. A key moment is the meeting where Bachmann has to make his appeal to the committee in charge of the case: "It's a plea for playing the long game in the face of the political risks of Issa or Abdullah going rogue and detonating a bomb on the Hamburg streets. Le Carré shrewdly gives the meeting to us entirely through Bachmann’s eyes. He’s the skilled operative shut out from the political decisions that will decide the success of his mission, nervously and resentfully steering his way through a thicket of obscure interests."

The resulting arguments are all very believable. But I guess we're now all so world-weary that we already know which way it's going to go.

And Wolfson, I think, has it exactly right when he concludes: "You read [the book's] characters and you get a sudden image [of the author]: the weathered, intense hiker sitting down to write each morning in the study on the cliffs in Penzance, his main sources of information the newspapers and the spies who come to visit, watching society disintegrate from afar. The hollowing-out of the post-Cold War West has brought out all the distancing tendencies embedded in his personality. He’s not concerned with Annabel or Tommy or Gunther or Issa; he’s concerned with them as examples of how the system is broken. Le Carre is writing about lost souls, but only in shorthand."

Interestingly, Wolfson thinks Anton Corbijn's 2014 movie adaptation is better: "This film is what le Carre, out on the Penzance cliffs, should have written from the start. He muddles his message because he’s still trying to craft believable characters when he doesn’t really want to. He wants to write political tracts embedded in brilliantly rendered suspense stories." Which is not to say we shouldn't appreciate him, just that we should be clearer about our expectations.