Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré, review: a tale of espionage and betrayal in the age of Brexit
Even the most devoted fans of John le Carré will admit the truth of some of the recent complaints made against his spy novels by Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. “He is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] officers are pretty angry with him,” Dearlove declared during an event at the Cliveden Literary Festival.
“His books are exclusively about betrayal … The feeling I get is that he intensely dislikes the service and what it represents.”
Le Carré himself has mischievously replied that “Sir Richard and his notional colleagues are going to be mad as bed-bugs” when they read his latest novel.
There is no doubt that betrayal is le Carré’s central subject, just as love was Jane Austen’s. Whatever the psychological reasons behind this, sticking to one subject has enabled le Carré’s large body of work to serve as a guide to the shifting mores of Britain over the six decades of his writing career.
We can compare and contrast the motives, manner and means of his spies’ acts of betrayal at the height of the Cold War with those of their counterparts in the days of, say, the War on Terror, observing what has changed while bearing in mind Bill Haydon’s observation (in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) that a nation’s secret services are an “expression of its subconscious”. Le Carré’s new novel is about betrayal in the age of Brexit.
It was a subject he groped towards in his last book, A Legacy of Spies (2017), which ended with George Smiley, prodded back into life after 27 years of hibernation, declaring that all the good he had achieved in his espionage career was done in the name of Europe rather than England. This felt like a ventriloquist’s puppet rather than the real Smiley; it gave me the same sort of queasy feeling I have when people presume to tell you how their long-dead war-hero grandparents would vote today.
There is nothing so mimsily oblique about the new novel, thankfully, which tackles Brexit head-on and, unlike the last book, is set during a specific, identifiable period: the run-up to President Trump’s first visit to the UK, in 2018. It suggests that Britain, in desperate pursuit of trade deals, is about to become Trump’s lap-dog – the same Trump who is complicit in his pal Putin’s plot to destabilise and conquer poor, decent, defenceless Europe – and asks how many good people working for the intelligence services will be able to avoid betraying them in such circumstances.
The novel is narrated by Nat, a brilliant agent runner for MI6 who, at nearly 47, is told he cannot compete with the “DPhils, fresh minds and advanced computer skills” of the younger generation and is reduced to running a crummy substation in Camden – “The Haven” – dealing with some of the less fruitful Russian double agents.
Nat, who has persuaded so many foreigners to spy on behalf of his country, wonders if it has been worth the effort in light of what we’ve ended up with: “A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit.” But his qualms are fairly mild compared with those of his friend Ed, a young media communications worker who routinely rants about Trump’s Nazification of the US when the pair settle to their pints after their weekly badminton sessions.
As the novel progresses, Ed’s fervent views lead him to take a course of action that lands both him and Nat in serious trouble. One might guess that le Carré, the old radical, is more sympathetic to Ed’s passionate convictions than Nat’s compromises and fence-sitting, but it transpires that Ed is dangerously naive, and, whether by accident or design, this ends up as a novel you can safely give as a Christmas present to any centrist dads of your acquaintance.
If it is more politically nuanced than some of his books, in other ways it’s identikit le Carré. Nat (né Anatoly) is a sardonic, patrician, chippy veteran spy of dual English-Russian heritage – in sharp contrast to the narrator of le Carré’s last novel, Peter (né Pierre) Guillam, who was a sardonic, patrician, chippy veteran spy of dual English-French heritage.
And, yes, there’s plenty to raise Richard Dearlove’s blood pressure: in le Carré’s world, poor old MI6 is still leaky, still prone to waste bright talents and over-promote the inept or corruptible, still beset by the petty rivalries between colleagues that are reflected in larger interdepartmental rivalries and the still larger rivalry between MIs 5 and 6.
As always, it is a sheer pleasure to read le Carré’s muscular prose. Few writers are so well able to convey strength and self-belief, with the result that the reader is forced to accept everything he says, sometimes against one’s better judgment.
He has little of the typical spy novelist’s interest in technology, but when Nat talks about making “constructive adjustments” to a target’s computer, a phrase that ought to seem too vague somehow bursts with confidence, conveying not so much that le Carré is ignorant of technical detail as that he finds it beneath his dignity to take notice of it, and you ought to feel the same.
What’s most remarkable is the way in which le Carré can still produce set-pieces of a type that he more or less invented 50 years ago and, at the age of 87, do them better than his scores of imitators.
The scene in which Nat tells his 19-year-old daughter that he is a spy rather than the mediocre diplomat she has always taken him for is a classic, and his trip to the Czech Republic to pump an unstable old triple agent is a masterclass in how to combine comedy with low-key menace.
The book is not really classifiable as a thriller – it hardly reaches the level of what the parental guidance ratings call “mild peril” – and might best be regarded as a satirical jeu d’esprit; but although a minor work, it is probably his most tonally consistent and wholly successful novel for some time. And, yes, his MI6 may not be the MI6, but it’s an effective device for mirroring the current state of the country and showing why we might, in le Carré’s view, be heading to hell in a handcart.
Agent Running in the Field is published by Viking at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
