Le Carré

Sometimes, instead of lunch, I buy books.

The last time, I bought a triune. Two of them I consumed in quick order. First John Sandford's Virgil Flowers mystery Dark of the Moon. Then Martin Cruz Smith's 6th Arkady Renko novel Stalin's Ghost. The last...

The last has been harder to digest. It is John Le Carré's A Most Wanted Man. Le Carré novels, like George Steiner essays, often weary me, sometimes annoy me with their repetitiveness, and always break my heart.

When I finish this very beautiful, very present little novel - as with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as with The Looking Glass War, as with A Small Town In Germany - I shall be sad, and have no appetite at all.



Spy novelist John Le Carré is now 76-years-old. He worked as a secret agent for British Intelligence (MI5 and MI6) in Germany during the Cold War. He has an unromantic view of spys, and has also become a critic of more recent British and American intelligence tactics used in the "war on Terror."

Recently, he spoke out against his own government for voting to extend the 42-day limit that terror suspects can be held without charge:

We have been taken to war under false pretences, and stripped of our civil liberties in an atmosphere of panic. Our lawyers don't take to the streets as they have in Pakistan. Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda. We haul our Foreign Secretary back from a mission to the Middle East so he can vote for 42 days' detention. People call me an angry old man. Screw them. You don't have to be old to be angry about that.

He also said he didn't expect his latest book to get a warm reception in the U.S. And, indeed, American Public Radio agreed with the New York Times that Le Carré has been unfair and beastly to the upright citizens of the C.I.A.