Morality tale with a difference

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré

Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and culture, is at the core of John le Carré’s latest novel. Stained by a centuries-long history of anti-semitism, tarnished by its recent association with Mohammed Atta, present-day Hamburg provides a writer with a rich mix of post-9/11 moral complexities — a city caught between an anxiety to make amends to the Americans for the outrage on Manhattan and its own guilt-driven desire, as Le Carré’s spymaster Bachmann bluntly puts it, ‘to make amends for its past sins’ by an ‘arse-licking tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity’.