In John le Carré’s fiction, personal morality collides messily with the grimly cynical expediencies of global politics.
In John le Carré’s fiction, personal morality collides messily with the grimly cynical expediencies of global politics. Loyalty is never something to take for granted. That is the issue at the heart of his new novel, his 22nd, as it is in so many of his other ones.
The plot centres on a pair of innocents abroad, both literally and figuratively — Perry, a left-leaning Oxford don who yearns to replace the dreaming spires with what he thinks of as real life; and his girlfriend, Gail, a young barrister hesitating between her career and the possibility of six children with Perry. A holiday in Antigua leads to life-changing decisions they hadn’t anticipated. Perry — a gifted amateur tennis player — plays a match with Dima, a neighbouring Russian tycoon, whose entourage includes an extended family and a bodyguard named Uncle Vanya.
Perry’s sense of fair play so impresses his opponent that Dima, perhaps a little improbably, decides to use Perry as his go-between with the British secret service. For Dima is in fact the world’s ‘number-one money-launderer’, as well as a murderous career criminal. Now he wants to liquidate his assets, settle in the UK and send his sons to Eton and his daughter to Roedean (if Eton cannot be persuaded to stretch a point and take girls). Dima’s one problem is that, once he liquidates his assets, his former associates will liquidate him. So he proposes a deal: if MI6 will guarantee him a safe haven, he will spill the rotten beans about what turns out to be an enormously lucrative deal involving Russian mafiosi, venal MPs, City moghuls, the solvency of the British nation and sinister Surrey oligarchs.
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