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John Le Carre's Post-Cold War Fiction PDF

204 Pages·2017·1.428 MB·English
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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

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