Meet the panelIAN CAMPBELL (IC) is Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at Edinburgh University.
ANDREW GREIG (AG) is a poet, novelist and mountaineering writer and Saltire Book of the Year Award winner for In An
other Light in 2004.
MARC LAMBERT (ML) is CEO of Scottish Book Trust, the national agency committed to the promotion of reading and writing.
ALLAN MASSIE (AM) is a highly regarded novelist. He is also Chief Fiction Reviewer for The Scotsman.
DAVID ROBINSON (DR) is Scotsman books editor. In Cold Ink, his book of interviews, is now Britain's 221,014th best-selling book.
DR: JOHN LE CARRÉ SETS HIS NEW novel in contemporary Hamburg, the ultra-rich German city where Mohammed Atta and at least five of his colleagues developed their 9/11 plot unhindered. Maybe because of that, there are now at least three countries' intelligence networks taking an interest when a young Russian Muslim torture victim called Issa is smuggled into the city at the dead of night.
They're not the only ones. Annabel, an idealistic young German human rights lawyer, is keen to help him. And so, to help her, is Tommy Brue, a British merchant banker in his early sixties.
Most of the book is about these three characters, with the reader constantly wondering whether Issa is a complete innocent, a criminal or an active terrorist. Yet towards the end it dramatically changes gear: instead of being the story of a rather esoteric love triangle, it opens up to become a cold, hard look at extraordinary rendition – how the West's spies spirit away Islamist terror suspects for torture in jails in parts of the world where they're not too fussy about it. Personally, I start off by giving le Carré bonus points for writing so intelligently about such a bang-up-to-date issue. What does everyone else think?
AM: I think this is le Carré back to his best. The end of the Cold War was bad news for him – and his readers. There was always much to admire in his later novels but some, like The Constant Gardener, had a barely suppressed fury in them that I thought unbalanced them. This one, it seemed to me, had some of the old themes in a new form.
One of the things that has always struck me about le Carré is that he's not good at narrative, at letting one thing happen after another, but he gets around it with these long, rambling conversations which actually move the story along. If you want someone to give you brisk narrative, which is what you'd normally look for in a novel about espionage (think of Buchan, Eric Ambler, or Graham Greene), le Carré isn't your man, but he compensates for it by his dialogue, which is usually terrific.
AG: The dialogue is usually at its best when he has one person persuade, cajole or blackmail someone else. He does that better than anyone else I've ever come across. Occasionally he slips up, and some of his characterisation seems rather perfunctory, as though it's been worked out on the back of an envelope: you know, like the lawyer Annabel cares for Issa because she's lost the last case similar to his, and the reason Tommy Brue falls for her is because his own marriage is falling apart ... It's a bit mechanical.
AM: I disagree. Unusually for me, I cared a lot about those characters. Annabel was as idealistic as, in my experience, young Germans tend to be as a reaction to the sheer weight of their history.
For a while, I found myself actually hoping that the novel would end happily.
There's even an element of light-heartedness about the writing, especially in the creation of the Tommy Brue character, even though I didn't really believe in his failing merchant bank.
AG: I think le Carré's world is generally the very male one from the Fifties, so he doesn't write modern women very well –
IC: What about Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, Mabs in A Perfect Spy?
AG: Certainly Annabel is more believable than most. The fact that she's German might have helped.
ML: I was slightly unconvinced by the three main characters. I read the book with enjoyment and kept turning the pages, but the central characters seemed to me to be put together in an unlikely knot. But other characters, such as the German spy Bachmann, were brilliantly done. However, the second half of the book, when the twists come, was terrific.
DR: That's when we see how the security services are lining up a Muslim preacher called Abdullah in their sights. He's supposed to be a moderate, a great giver to charity, yet may be diverting fractions of the money towards terror front organisations.
ML: I think le Carré shows us very cleverly and economically the gulf that exists between the Islamicist way of thinking about history, politics and religion and the West's attitude which is, effectively, 'Who cares about the past?' It's a chilling confrontation. Neither side comes out well, but the western attitude is especially repugnant.
IC: "They'll confess in two weeks."
AG: But here, I like the fact that Issa wasn't a good guy. He was actually a pain in the arse.
ML: That's one thing about the Islamic characters in the book – they don't talk, they lecture. That was done very well in the dialogue.
IC: I don't think there's any kind of split between Issa's and Abdullah's stories in the book – it's marvellously written and constructed right from the first chapter.
There are two things I would draw out of this novel, without spoiling it for people who haven't read it.
Firstly, it's a post-9/11 novel, and anti-Muslim sentiment has been sharpened not just by that but also by the London bombings. It's a different novel because of that. There's a wall there between a western understanding and what the two Muslim characters, Issa and Abdullah, are saying and he captures that very well. Their different conceptions are not resolved in this novel and I admire it for that.
The other theme is betrayal – the thread that runs through all of le Carré's novels – The Tailor of Panama was betrayed, The Constant Gardener was betrayed, the narrator in The Mission Song was betrayed. Smiley knew he, and the whole British Secret Service had been betrayed, the old certainties replaced (as Connie Sachs lamented) "by half-angels and half-devils".
There are people in this book, as there always are with le Carré, who try to do the right thing – and The System is waiting for them. They don't stand a chance. So there is anger in this book and it's not just directed against the bombers – it's directed against the torturers, against their bosses, "people who come in helicopters and leave in helicopters".
AM: Most people writing this kind of book – like Charles Cumming, whose spy novels I rather like – put in too much action. But le Carré doesn't. He knows how little you actually need.
IC: "A lot of the muscle, he said, was done electrically." That's the entire torture scene in Tinker Tailor. Yet at the same time, in the plot, he is leaving behind time-bombs of unexplainedness, and leaving it up to us to stitch it together.
And one of the reasons why the characters aren't appealing to everyone is that they are deliberately incomplete and the narrative, beautifully paced as it is, is also deliberately incomplete and the ending leaves you with so many questions – all not through lack of talent but deliberate incompleteness – because this is le Carré's vision of our society.
DR: With the biggest unexplained thing of all whether any lives have been lost because of the actions of the main Islamist suspect, who is described as "five per cent bad".
AG: Yes, that's the core of the book. How bad is "five per cent bad"? Is anyone better than that? And if a man is locked up for whatever being five per cent bad turns out to mean ...
IC: And cleverly, in the end, we are never really told …
AG: … so innocent people who just happened to know him might get locked up too. And that's one thing that really did get home to me – how easy it is to make someone's life look very bad indeed, if you're seen at the wrong funeral service, at the wrong mosque.
AM: And what you have to weigh against that is that parts of the German secret service are prepared to send a man back to Russia
IC: Or even a worse place ...
AM: Without thinking about what he could face there. And what percentage of good or bad is there among them? Because they, in their view, are fighting a war against terror... And justice, especially in view of the American secret service, has to be as summary as it is in a western. So that's bad too.
And then if Abdullah really is funding terrorism, well clearly that's bad as well...
IC: And yet along with all this moral relativism, I found the portrait of Hamburg completely convincing. And he's perfectly captured the formality of the Germans. They may be shafting each other with their office politics but it's always with perfect civility.
ML: Yes, le Carré remains one of the best writers around. Here he really taps into the zeitgeist. It's not quite perfect but ...
IC: The Sunday Times said his masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, was "universally acknowledged as a perfect work of fiction", yet really no book is perfect. But there's an explosive finish, a calculated anticlimax, and a full stop that really works.
An extract from A Most Wanted ManBRUE TOOK A SLOW TOUR ROUND the room.
But why on earth did you do it, dear father of mine?
Why, when all your life you traded on your good name and that of your forebears, and lived by it in private as well as in public, in the highest traditions of Scottish caution, canniness and dependability: why put all that at risk for the sake of a bunch of crooks and carpetbaggers from the East whose one achievement had been to plunder their country's assets at the moment when it had most need of them?
Why throw open your bank to them? – your beloved bank, your most precious thing? Why offer safe haven to their ill-gained loot, along with unprecedented terms of secrecy and protection?
Why stretch every norm and regulation to its snapping-point and beyond, in a desperate – and as Brue had perceived it, even at the time – reckless attempt to set himself up as Vienna's banker of choice to a bunch of Russian gangsters?
All right, you hated Communism and Communism was on its deathbed. You couldn't wait for the funeral. But the crooks you were being so nice to were part of the regime!
No names needed, comrades! Just give us your loot for five years and we'll give you a number! And when you next come and see us your Lipizzaners will be lily-white, full-grown, runaway investments! We do it just like the Swissies, but we're Brits so we do it better!
Except we don't, thought Brue sadly, hands linked behind his back as he paused to peer out of the bay window.
We don't because great men who lose their marbles in old age die; because money relocates itself and so do banks; and because strange people called regulators appear on the scene and the past goes away. Except that it never quite does, does it? A few words from a choirboy and it all comes galloping home.
© John le Carré from A Most Wanted Man, published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £18.99
The full article contains 2002 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
