John Le Carre's Post-Cold War Fiction

204 Pages·2017·1.428 MB·English

by  Robert Lance Snyder

JOHN LE CARRÉ’S POST–COLD WAR FICTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ’S POST–COLD WAR FICTION
Robert Lance Snyder
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS
Columbia
Copyright © 2017 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved. First printing, 2017.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-2099-8
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2016945535
This paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Typeface: Minion
For my grandsons, Colton and Elliot,
who restore my faith in what yet may be

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction
John le Carré’s Post–Cold War Journey 3
1 The Night Manager and Our Game
“We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us” 21
2 The Tailor of Panama and Single & Single
Ludic Fabrication, Self-Begotten Sons, and a New World Order 47
3 The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends
“Whoever Owns the Truth Owns the Game” 69
4 The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man
Covert Surveillance, Deniable Syndicates, and Extraordinary Rendition 93
5 Our Kind of Traitor and A Delicate Truth
“Who Were We Doing All This Secrecy Stuff For?” 117
Conclusion
John le Carré and the Cultural Imaginary 141
Notes 149
Bibliography 173
Index 185
vii

PREFACE
T
his book is an extension of a previous one. While writing The Art of In-
direction in British Espionage Fiction, which sought to chart that subgenre’s
evolution from Eric Ambler onward, I found myself returning often to John
le Carré’s post–Cold War novels in order to grasp more fully how they re-
sponded to the momentous change in geopolitics that began during the early
1990s. Despite this quantum shift in world affairs, le Carré recognized that
the literary mode with which his name is synonymous was not in jeopardy
of obsolescence. On November 19, 1989, ten days after the start of the Berlin
Wall’s demolition, he commented in the Washington Post that “if an era is
dead, the [spy] genre faces a long and boisterous renaissance.” His piece ti-
tled “Will Spy Novels Come In from the Cold?” elaborated on this prediction
as follows:
The real excitement will come where it always came from: from the interac-
tion of reality and self- delusion which is at the heart of so many secret lives.
From the edgy dither between the ingenious and the idiotic. From the blind
trust which politicians, through despair or impatience, invest in supposedly
unaccountable intelligence services with disastrous results. From our com-
mon capacity, whatever nation we belong to, to torture the truth until it tells
us what we want to hear. From the way the spy story can take us to the center
of any conflict, even if the conflict turns out to be within ourselves. From the
infinite variety of motive for loyalty and betrayal; and from the way the mo-
tive of the traitor comes to mirror the morality of our times.
ix