Yet le Carré’s undiminished anger is as bracing as an east wind. It is provocative in the true sense of that overworked adjective. Almost every book of his makes me want to argue in a way that other modern novels don’t. Is spying really any more deforming as a profession than soldiering or being a lawyer or policeman, let alone a politician or a journalist? And if le Carré’s novels really persuaded you that it was, would so many spooks be such fans of his, just as senior civil servants adored Sir Humphrey and lawyers love John Grisham (there’s a fortune awaiting the novelist who can come up with a page-turner about creative accounting)? Aren’t the Arabs just a little too noble in The Little Drummer Girl, and isn’t there just a whiff of an international Jewish conspiracy in the final pages of that enthralling novel? Are the big pharmaceutical companies quite so machiavellian as depicted in The Constant Gardener? Ever since Harry Lime started cutting penicillin, Big Pharma has been a convenient villain, but would life-expectancy in the Third World have improved so quickly without it?
Perhaps my habit of rebelling against the message is a rare and shameful quirk. Perhaps I am the only reader of Middlemarch who actually wants Mr Casaubon to discover the key to all mythologies so he can say snubs to that annoying Dorothea. Perhaps I am the only reader of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to identify with Sir Clifford. So it may be that I shall be the only reader of The Mission Song who has a sneaking hope that Maxie’s plot actually succeeds and the Mwangaza is parachuted into power ahead of the elections. Poor Salvo complains that the Congo is a land dying of neglect by the outside world, a country in which four million dead can finish up ‘on page 29, next to the quick crossword’. So is intervention always hopelessly misguided? After all, as I am writing this review, I read reports in the newspapers, on page 31 of the Times for example, of bodies littering the streets of Kinshasa as fierce fighting breaks out in advance of the second round of presidential elections. Might not a tiny coup have forestalled the anarchy?
But of course such a shameful thought is total fantasy, and it is part of le Carré’s cunning to have lured me into thinking it. To see that no good could ever have come of such an intrinsically squalid enterprise, you have only to look at the real-life counterpart of Maxie’s little caper, the aborted coup in Equatorial Guinea (Sir Mark Thatcher prop.), and to watch the real-life Maxie, Simon Mann, the son and grandson of England cricket captains, being led away in irons, filthy, dishevelled and disgraced. And to those who fondly believe that HMG could never get mixed up in such a disreputable business, we need only recall the warm enthusiasm expressed by Our Man in Sierra Leone for the latest regime change there. This is darkness visible and it is John le Carré’s abiding mastery to make us see it even if we would rather not.
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