Regrettably the latest John le Carré does not live up to the author’s magnificent reputation. It is therefore not just disappointing but dismaying to see the extraordinary inductive and subtle writing of this enduring and often undervalued (from a literary perspective) writer put to such thin use. Our Kind of Traitor feels like a retread.
I confess to owning all his books and regularly reread his best – never a disappointing exercise. But it has to be said: his greatest work is behind him. (He apparently has a contract to produce a book every two years. It shows.)
In Traitor, a well-meaning Oxford academic and his girlfriend – beautiful and slightly too giddy (a stock le Carré character – check The Honourable Schoolboy as example) – bump into a rich Russian scoundrel while on holiday in the Caribbean. Of course they’re out of their depth very quickly, and the subtext turns out to be less about the modern “cold war” of money mafia, and more about the devious internal workings of the spy world, a world with which Le Carré has long held an ambivalent relationship.
All his usual trademarks are tipped into this overheated mix: the missing mother, the betrayed friend, the cynical American “cousins” (spies), the priest-like devotion of someone newly converted to the Cause.
But it is all a little too familiar, and therefore that most surprising of accusations to be levelled at such an inventive writer – predictable. It is a far cry from this great author at the height of his powers – the Smiley Trilogy, The Little Drummer Girl, and the simply magnificent A Perfect Spy, written in 1986; his most autobiographical book, well worth seeking out, and as close to perfection as it gets. Rather return to those.
I have just finished rereading A Perfect Spy for the umpteenth time and the first 50 pages or so had me gasping all over again – in fact the entire book is a revelation and a joy. Some of the dialogue is worth framing, especially the glorious meeting between the American and British “special relationship” spooks – and it well amplifies Le Carré’s loathing of the American way of doing such business. Our Kind of Traitor pales next to it, though some of the themes are (again) shared.
After much prevarication in his early career – his first two books, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality are worth revisiting to see the master in already impressive embryo – Le Carré finally admitted to having been involved in spying for his country, though the details have remained somewhat obscure like the author, who seldom grants interviews.
Even his name (David Cornwell in real life, and what’s more he lives in Cornwall near Land’s End) is a pseudonym, perhaps to draw a veil over his disjointed early life which included a minor public school, a strangely absent mother who “disappeared” and was never referred to, Oxford and spytrade, and a murky father who was jailed for fraud.
He once famously remarked that spying is very close to the creative act of writing. Probably only if you’re very good at it.
His earlier books are very, very good indeed.
This one is less so, much as it grieves me to say so.