Le Carré's descent from Graham Greene grows ever more plain

.. which is only to say, from Ford Madox Ford, Mauriac, and Conrad, too. Le Carré prefaced his last book, A Most Wanted Man, with this aphorism from the aristocratic Edwardian philosopher, Friedrich von Hügel, The golden rule is, to help those we love to escape from us.

Morbidly attractive to the adolescent, this precept has been a consideration in the fiction of John Le Carré at least since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and by the 80th page of his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor, we are fully aware of its liveliness in this one. A distinctively Roman Catholic perspective, its natural place in the structuring of moral suspense is inherent in a real world of patriotism betrayed by cynicism. Just think, Clarence Thomas is the most qualified man I could possibly name to the Supreme Court, and you have the measure of its application. Between governments and gangsters, Le Carré now reminds us again, only God distinguishes one's treachery from the other's.

With the end of the Cold War this writer's genius for transmitting the pain and certitude of that treachery has only deepened, reaching to Alberich's forge beneath the Rhenish surface. In the present book and the last two, he has leant with devastating vigor on the seduction of the young, in what amounts to a brilliant actuarial progress from Smiley to the ground zero of moral crime, youth at the cusp of entitlement. The place in hell where we are going now is too gorgeously contrasted with where we have been, even to be contemplated except with Le Carré's courage. I dare Barack Obama to read this book.

A brilliantly promising tennis jock mountaineer preceptor in literature - straight out of John Buchan, if the truth be known - and his uncannily pretty barrister girlfriend, reminiscent of Amanda Hesser in Cooking for Mr Latte, escape to Antigua to contemplate their mystifying romantic predicament in the wrong place. (Were this the first time for such a migration, Greece would be landlocked). At worst, you'd expect a quiet annulment down the road, but such things are nastier in Le Carré, possibly for the reason that they're never quiet, in the first place.

Greene used to insist on calling such works, entertainments. A man once sued by Shirley Temple for the candour of a film review could well have chosen a less treacherous term for his illuminations. Le Carré's embrace of that tradition is balsam for storylovers everywhere, and nothing less than patriots deserve.

George Herbert Walker Bush
July 1st, 1991


John Le Carré
Our Kind of Traitor
Viking Penguin
David Cornwell, 2010©