Morality tale with a difference

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré

Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and culture, is at the core of John le Carré’s latest novel. Stained by a centuries-long history of anti-semitism, tarnished by its recent association with Mohammed Atta, present-day Hamburg provides a writer with a rich mix of post-9/11 moral complexities — a city caught between an anxiety to make amends to the Americans for the outrage on Manhattan and its own guilt-driven desire, as Le Carré’s spymaster Bachmann bluntly puts it, ‘to make amends for its past sins’ by an ‘arse-licking tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity’.

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Into this city, ‘parading its inexhaustible, amazing, indiscriminate tolerance’, and with its shadowy hinterland of mutually exclusive vested interests, is pitched Issa, an illegal Muslim immigrant. Issa may or may not have a terrorist past but he certainly has the profile to attract suspicions. The product of the rape of a Chechen woman by a Red Army colonel, he has come to Hamburg to escape beatings and torture in Russia and Turkey and hopes to train as a doctor. Through Turkish intermediaries he meets Annabel, a human-rights lawyer, and through Annabel makes contact with Tommy Brue, whose private British bank once offered murky financial services to Issa’s father. Annabel is sympathetic to his plight, Tommy to her cause, and together they constitute the bleeding heart of liberal Hamburg. Its steelier side emerges as Issa’s presence is picked up by every rival agency of the intelligence community and the subsequent story is played out against all the ambiguities implied by the book’s title.