Morality tale with a difference
Honor Clerk
A MOST WANTED MAN by John le Carré Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99, pp. 340, ISBN 9780340977064 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 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’.
Into this city, ‘parading its inexhaustible, amazing, indiscriminate tolerance’, and with its shadowy hinterland of mutually exclusive vested interests, is pitched Issa, an illegal Muslim immigrant. Issa may or may not have a terrorist past but he certainly has the profile to attract suspicions. The product of the rape of a Chechen woman by a Red Army colonel, he has come to Hamburg to escape beatings and torture in Russia and Turkey and hopes to train as a doctor. Through Turkish intermediaries he meets Annabel, a human-rights lawyer, and through Annabel makes contact with Tommy Brue, whose private British bank once offered murky financial services to Issa’s father. Annabel is sympathetic to his plight, Tommy to her cause, and together they constitute the bleeding heart of liberal Hamburg. Its steelier side emerges as Issa’s presence is picked up by every rival agency of the intelligence community and the subsequent story is played out against all the ambiguities implied by the book’s title. Issa is ‘wanted’ by those who care for him because he fulfils a need, he is a ‘wanted man’ for his supposed terrorist affiliations, and he is — most clinically — wanted for his potential as a pawn in the convoluted game of counter-terrorism.
This is Le Carré territory and his faithful readers will feel at home in a world that he has made distinctively his own. There is the familiar backing group to what he calls the ‘espiocracy’ — the whizz-kid computer nerd, the double act of smoothies from the British Secret Service, the right-wing hard man from the German Ministry of the Interior at war with the urbane head of German Foreign Intelligence, the suave American hit-man and a mysterious ‘other’ who puts in the odd appearance but says nothing. Stock characters from central casting, perhaps, but this being Le Carré, there is more to it when it comes to the principals. These are drawn with all his old skill to produce a tale that consciously explores the difference between black and white moral landscapes and the night and the light and the half-light of human emotions. Issa is both victim and manipulator, devout yet ignorant of his religion, attractive and repellent. And as the catalyst of the novel he has a lifechanging effect on everyone with whom he comes into contact. The jaded banker finds his conscience, the lawyer feels compelled to put life before law, the spymaster demonstrates his humanity — and if this sounds like a morality tale then that is because it is one. Just not, perhaps — this is Le Carré after all — the one that for nine-tenths of the book it appears to be. ❑
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