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A review by coronaurora
A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré
4.0
With Corbijn's film around the corner I thought about diving into Le Carre's source text. And was absolutely gobsmacked by this little thing of beauty. I have not paid much attention to Carre before, and the overall rating here suggests this is far from his best. Well, considering even this took my breath away, I cannot wait to gorge over the back catalogue.
To write a political crime thriller where the necessity and inertia of forward propulsion in narration and plot almost always takes precedence to nuanced character sketches and meditations, Le Carre plays against-type and is able to concoct a gourmet chicken soup for the soul with one hand while balancing familiar genre plates in his circus-adept dominant hand. It's a rare thriller interested in its characters' inner lives and thanks to Le Carre's excellent prose, you are too. Archetypes they might be, but they are many shades more coloured than anything most mainstream spy thrillers are peopled with.
So what's it about? A bashed-up illegal immigrant lands on streets of Hamburg and is taken in by a Turkish immigrant family. He carries a reference number with him that must reach a private bank-owning millionaire, and aided by a legal firm with a conscientous female lawyer, the contents of the resulting Pandora's Box must be despatched as per the tortured, fleeing immigrant's wishes. Other than answering the standard queries of Who this man is, How did he come to be, in the world and in the country now, Is he really who he says he is, there is an extra layer of people watching this human drama play out. Sniffers. Plenty of these abound behind cameras and disguised common-men in this heavily surveillanced modern metropolis. Sniffers reporting to agents reporting to committees of German, British and American Intelligence agencies. Precisely how the warring and competing factions and sub-factions of these outfits manoeuvre and outmanoeuvre each other to extricate a meaningful transaction that involves taking down the Most Wanted Man is the plot's core.
The fleeing immigrant being Muslim, his moorings and subsequent entanglements give Carre a lot of space to write in the operational logistics of international terror and counter-terror networks along with the humanitarian injustices meted out at political and personal levels to one of the central characters. The cultural schizophrenia and the clash of manners when two of the three main characters share close quarters produces some intended and unintended hilarity, but the author's humanity and an attempt at contextualising this paranoid geopolitical space is redoubtable. It's been six years since its publication but it feels just as urgent and relevant given the post 9/11 contemporary reality of religious fundamentalism continues to be an everyday spectre. Le Carre wears his politics on his sleeve and the punchy, abrupt climax where more players from the shadows emerge drill home the contrasting attitudes and power-scales of security agencies between nations brilliantly.
Given his ouevre, he is clearly an old hand at drawing convincing spy agencies, and this is most easily visible at the dexterity with which he pens the institutional politics and push-and-pull within and between agencies. It's remarkably structured too, not only in keeping its cards close to its chest about the exact identity of the titular Man but in managing multiple narrative voice switches band intercutting between more than three scenes in parallel. There is none of the flabby exposition dumps that stand apart from the actual fictional narrative: a folly committed all too often by lesser craftsmen in their earnestness to give their reader a cast of characters intensely engaged with the real world as those here. For every history-byte paragraph there is a well-calibrated, clipped-phrases, easy-read conversation. All in all, this is a compulsive page turner that makes you feel sorry for reading too fast and not dwelling on the measured prose long enough. But that's what repeat reads are for.
To write a political crime thriller where the necessity and inertia of forward propulsion in narration and plot almost always takes precedence to nuanced character sketches and meditations, Le Carre plays against-type and is able to concoct a gourmet chicken soup for the soul with one hand while balancing familiar genre plates in his circus-adept dominant hand. It's a rare thriller interested in its characters' inner lives and thanks to Le Carre's excellent prose, you are too. Archetypes they might be, but they are many shades more coloured than anything most mainstream spy thrillers are peopled with.
So what's it about? A bashed-up illegal immigrant lands on streets of Hamburg and is taken in by a Turkish immigrant family. He carries a reference number with him that must reach a private bank-owning millionaire, and aided by a legal firm with a conscientous female lawyer, the contents of the resulting Pandora's Box must be despatched as per the tortured, fleeing immigrant's wishes. Other than answering the standard queries of Who this man is, How did he come to be, in the world and in the country now, Is he really who he says he is, there is an extra layer of people watching this human drama play out. Sniffers. Plenty of these abound behind cameras and disguised common-men in this heavily surveillanced modern metropolis. Sniffers reporting to agents reporting to committees of German, British and American Intelligence agencies. Precisely how the warring and competing factions and sub-factions of these outfits manoeuvre and outmanoeuvre each other to extricate a meaningful transaction that involves taking down the Most Wanted Man is the plot's core.
The fleeing immigrant being Muslim, his moorings and subsequent entanglements give Carre a lot of space to write in the operational logistics of international terror and counter-terror networks along with the humanitarian injustices meted out at political and personal levels to one of the central characters. The cultural schizophrenia and the clash of manners when two of the three main characters share close quarters produces some intended and unintended hilarity, but the author's humanity and an attempt at contextualising this paranoid geopolitical space is redoubtable. It's been six years since its publication but it feels just as urgent and relevant given the post 9/11 contemporary reality of religious fundamentalism continues to be an everyday spectre. Le Carre wears his politics on his sleeve and the punchy, abrupt climax where more players from the shadows emerge drill home the contrasting attitudes and power-scales of security agencies between nations brilliantly.
Given his ouevre, he is clearly an old hand at drawing convincing spy agencies, and this is most easily visible at the dexterity with which he pens the institutional politics and push-and-pull within and between agencies. It's remarkably structured too, not only in keeping its cards close to its chest about the exact identity of the titular Man but in managing multiple narrative voice switches band intercutting between more than three scenes in parallel. There is none of the flabby exposition dumps that stand apart from the actual fictional narrative: a folly committed all too often by lesser craftsmen in their earnestness to give their reader a cast of characters intensely engaged with the real world as those here. For every history-byte paragraph there is a well-calibrated, clipped-phrases, easy-read conversation. All in all, this is a compulsive page turner that makes you feel sorry for reading too fast and not dwelling on the measured prose long enough. But that's what repeat reads are for.