Le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field review – a riot of liberal sentiment set free

When an author has written twenty-four novels, one should expect (and perhaps even hope) that they tread familiar ground with their twenty-fifth. Authors of this kind are rare enough to be special; special enough to maintain a dialogue with their reader across multiple millions of words. As much as there’s something to say about authors exploring radically new ground, readers often don’t want that newness to be at the expense of their strengths.

And so it is with John le Carré, whose latest novel, Agent Running in the Field, was published last week. To describe it briefly as “typical” le Carré fare is to mischaracterise it. It is certainly a spy story but, through the prism of Brexit, the author has found new ways of projecting old themes. Le Carré is angrier than he has perhaps ever been on the page. That lends the book a sense of urgency that may well lessen over time and diminish with political distance. In the right moment, however, it slams its points home with a force one might not expect from a writer in his 88th year.

Le Carré’s great books, specifically the Karla trilogy, written in the 1970s, were set in the Cold War but the themes were never narrow. Le Carré explored how his protagonists felt, thought, believed, lived, and often died according to their many illusions. Even his pen name (he is really called David Cornwell) suggested self-recognition wasn’t so easy in the covert world.

Le Carré brought a clerical solemnity to the business of spying. This was James Bond going to confessional, where the author could strip away the machismo. His spooks internalised the Cold War hostilities which were then manifested in personal drama. He created books infused with moral dread; where it was usually impossible to distinguish right from wrong. Good people did bad things for even worse reasons; bad people succeeded sometimes by playing the system well. George Smiley was somewhere between the two. Even when the Cold War ended (albeit briefly), le Carré found his universal truths elsewhere. Good, bad, and the realms in between, were there in the emergence of mega-corporations, the destruction of the environment, and even the international movement of money.

Much of that is still true of his latest novel. MI6’s “The Circus” is now “The Office” but archetypes are the same: the jaded handlers, the betrayed friendships, the mendacious grifters climbing the service ranks. Like most of le Carré’s protagonists, Nat – the middle-aged MI6 handler given one last job – is anchored to beliefs that are constantly challenged. “Nobody knows who they are just now, do they? Whole fucking country in disarray,” says one of the more firmly anchored figures towards the end.

That dislocation is felt wherever le Carré fixates his anxieties. Old Cold War insecurities did, usually, end with a resolution that implied there was a nominally better side. Our Brexit crisis leaves us with no such assurances. Britain in the book is caught between America and her old European allies. The result is schizophrenic. Le Carré, populates the pages with real figures and, one suspects, real feelings. Buried in the text are acid passages that crackle with splenetic fizz. They usually centre around the figure of Donald Trump. “[T]he man is a total nothing,” writes le Carré in the voice of his protagonist. “A mob orator. But as a symptom of what’s out there in the world’s undergrowth, waiting be stirred up, he’s the devil incarnate.”

Yet in the next breath, he recognises his own prejudices. “A simplistic view, you might say, not everyone’s by any means. But deeply felt all the same. Particularly if you’re by way of being an obsessive pro-European.”

And that is the point. Le Carré is something of an obsessive pro-European himself. And that bias is perhaps the way to read the novel. It is provocative in ways that are at times glaringly comic. If his last novel, A Legacy of Spies, ended with Smiley offering a hymn to the European project, this book is a riot of liberal sentiment set free.

A wife who would have once been cold and distant is now devoted, proximate and reads The Guardian. What might have been a cliché of spy novels, “watchers” observing a clandestine meet, becomes an allegory of le Carré’s worldview: “On our screens is London as we love it to be: multi-ethnic kids playing improvised netball, girls in summer dresses basking in rays of the endless sun, old folk saunter arm in arm, mothers pushing prams, picnickers under spreading trees, outdoor chess, boules. A friendly bobby strolls comfortably among them.” Boules to bobbies: this is le Carré’s internationalism wedded to what is left of his patriotism.

Agent Running in the Field is as angry, funny, and readable as le Carré has been in a very long time but whether you rate it as one of his best might depend on how sympathetic you are to his conclusions. As serious as it is at times playful, it is, throughout, delightfully pointed.