A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré - review

John Le Carré is one of a select group of novelists whose vivid and internally coherent imaginative worlds are so recognisable that their names have become adjectives — Dickensian, Wodehousian, Kafka-esqe. Thus, we all know what we mean by Le Carré-esque — the shifting sands of the Cold War, its depths and shallows reflected in the moral composition of those who fought it, sinister and impersonal state interests pitted against the individual, the inevitability of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, London grey in fog and rain, the outward manifestation of the inner landscape. The Cold War is long gone, of course — at least in its more overt and formal aspects — but in his latest novel Le Carré shows that his world of moral equivocation translates effortlessly into the 21st century.

A Delicate Truth is unusual in the Le Carré canon in that it doesn’t explicitly feature MI6 or the other intelligence services. They have an off-stage presence but the real action involves Toby Bell, a sympathetic and conscientious Foreign Office official who uncovers corruption, cover-up and criminal deceit in the heart of Whitehall. In his dramatisation of the secret blurring of public and private interests, highlighting relentless ambition and moral cowardice, Le Carré depicts the Deep State — the inner core of the establishment — as the real enemy of institutional and individual decency. One character in particular embodies all that arouses his Dickensian indignation — ‘your normal, rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely-spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless of where he got them from’. We all know this man; he thrives where power lies.