Le Carré: Thriller mirrors Brexit anxiety,
John le Carré’s 25th novel has the trappings of spy thrillers but addresses real-world concerns
He may be best known as a Cold War novelist, but John le Carré’s 25th novel couldn’t possibly be more contemporary. With his characters caught up in anxiety over Britain’s place in a post-Brexit world, Agent Running in the Field is being published just as Britain seems to be careening helplessly to a needless disaster.
International politics is not just at the heart of the plot, it’s also what motivates his main characters. The narrator, Nat, is an older spy called back to the home country and put out to pasture at an insignificant post in London. He accidentally meets and befriends Ed, a young, socially awkward researcher for a media company. They bond over their mutual passion for badminton, of all things. Between matches Ed confesses his increasing anxiety over the state of the world. Not just with Brexit, but with the election of Donald Trump and America’s reckless abandonment of decades of foreign policy.
Coming home from decades of running spies abroad, Nat is trying to patch up his marriage with his crusading lawyer wife, and to reconnect with his nowgrown daughter. She thinks he’s always been a mediocre, mid-level civil servant. The scene in which Nat reveals to her his true occupation is played almost like a field operation in itself. Yet most of the plot shows Nat spending inordinate amounts of time with his new young friend, Ed, whom he bonds with so closely that later in the book he will risk everything and enlist his wife’s help to keep Ed from falling into the clutches of his own intelligence organization.
While much of the novel takes place on the badminton court and in the bar afterward, there are also clandestine trips across Europe replete with all the trappings of any spy thriller: false names, multiple passports, secret messages, age-old favours called in. Possibly the most effective of these is Nat’s visit to an old Russian adversary, now a billionaire oligarch. The air of danger and security around this meeting has a James Bond feel to it but at the same time is one of the novel’s most poignant episodes. The two men are both near the end of their careers and caught off guard by the direction the world has taken.
A few plot twists are almost enough to undermine the reader’s confidence in the narrator: If he’s really such an expert old hand, how can he have missed these things? Yet le Carré’s writing is so strong he overcomes this quibble. He’s lost none of his master’s touch. We believe in this character, and so we believe in the story he’s telling us. No matter how preposterous the idea of Britain abandoning Europe.