John le Carré
THE MISSION SONG
352pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £17.99.
0 340 92196 8
In a 1977 interview, John le Carré was asked what he wanted from life. “Although it sounds pious,” he responded, “I would like to get better as a writer. I would like to . . . become perhaps more sheer, in some ways to reduce, in other ways to concentrate the scope as it were.” The Mission Song, his twentieth novel, is one of his tautest works, harking back to the lean thrillers he wrote in the early 1960s. It is a fast-paced, entertaining book, in which most of the action takes place over the course of a few days in London and on a nameless northern island. The restricted scope is also a return to his earliest works; his later tales often involve a dizzying array of locations, with the protagonists shunting to and fro like Phileas Fogg. And, whereas many of his books have a cinematic quality that has helped them to translate successfully to the screen, The Mission Song is a chamber work more suited to the stage, as it consists largely of dialogue among a small cast.
An interesting departure from his other novels, The Mission Song also shows that in his seventy-fifth year, le Carré continues to experiment with a genre whose basic conventions he mastered when he was in his early thirties. A major innovation is the first-person narrator Bruno Salvador, nicknamed “Salvo”, the son of a “bog Irish Catholic missionary and a Congolese village woman”. Race is a relatively new element in le Carré’s work; he has been more comfortable depicting (and brilliantly satirizing) distinctions of class. In other respects, however, the twenty-eight-year-old Salvo does fit the mould of the typical le Carré protagonist: he is a naive, self-divided figure desperately seeking a unifying purpose. His initials, B. S., suggest his duplicitous nature, just as his surname, Salvador, hints at his ultimate redemption. More remarkably, he was raised as a Roman Catholic. Catholicism and espionage are firmly associated with Graham Greene, le Carré’s only equal in creating sophisticated novels with a moral theme in which spying is a metaphor for modern life. In contrast to Greene, le Carré is what might be called a firm Protestant, if not an outright Puritan, given his repeated emphasis on the sanctity of the individual conscience. He has criticized any version of a One True Faith, be it religious or secular. So when we find the Catholic Salvo reading Cromwell, Our Chief of Men, ostensibly to improve his knowledge of English history, we are alert: is the Counter-Reformation coming into play? The Mission Song attunes us to many of le Carré’s long-standing preoccupations, but in a new key; and it provides an occasion to reflect on his singular contribution to modern literature.
Le Carré might be in a reflective mood, for Salvo’s story recalls one of the earliest classics of espionage fiction, Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901). Kipling’s young Kimball O’Hara is not of mixed parentage, but like Salvo he is the orphaned son of an Irishman, and his loyalties are divided between two countries. Kim is torn between India, where he passes as a native, and England, which recruits him to play “the Great Game” of spying among the imperial powers. At the outset of The Mission Song, Salvo is a “zebra”, not fully at home in England, to which he has emigrated, or Africa, where he was brought up by missionaries; he too is recruited by British Intelligence because he can mediate between cultures. But the different trajectories taken by these likeable, ambivalent spies highlight the changed attitudes to espionage and patriotism between Kipling’s time and ours. Whereas for Kim the Great Game has moral legitimacy, Salvo comes to question its entire rationale. And while Kim is caught between his Indian and English identities, Salvo’s experiences lead him to choose between his African and English ones. Le Carré strongly indicts racism in The Mission Song, yet Salvo’s need to choose says less about the prospects for a multicultural Britain, and more about le Carré’s belief that compromise often masks hypocrisy and irresolution. Salvo may be a Catholic, but in the end he adopts the position favoured by the Protestant writer Søren Kierkegaard, who insisted that life’s questions involve a choice between Either/Or, not Both/And.
The epigraph to The Mission Song is from Joseph Conrad. Salvo must undergo his own journey into the Heart of Darkness before he attains wisdom. He is introduced to the reader as a talented London translator who, because he wishes to please his clients, tends to overlook the content, legitimate or otherwise, of what he translates. Appreciating both his gifts and his lack of scruples, British Intelligence employs him as a translator for covert operations. He is farmed out to a nameless multinational known as the Syndicate which is plotting a coup in his former homeland of the Eastern Congo. The Syndicate, like Salvo, claims it can satisfy all customers. The new regime it intends to install will secure vast profits, but the welfare of the nation and its suffering peoples is the Syndicate’s ultimate objective. One member describes the mission in familiar terms: the Syndicate will deliver “democracy at the end of a gun barrel . . . . We’re intervening and we’re staying. And this time, it’s the Congo that’s going to be the lucky winner”. The puppet regime calls itself “the Middle Path”; evidently they and their Syndicate sponsor are wedded to Both/And.
Salvo initially accepts this shop-worn rhet-oric because he wants a role that will provide him with a secure sense of self. In many of le Carré’s novels, men who are tempted in this way discover that ambition to be hollow; espionage only amplifies the insecurities that drew them to it in the first place. They learn that being a spy is not a role but a multiplicity of roles, to say nothing of endless betrayal. It cannot provide the self-integration they seek, but rather offers the “controlled schizophrenia” of ephemeral identities. It is thus not surprising that le Carré’s protagonists often come to bad ends; as he has admitted, “most of the endings are apocalyptic . . . . It’s the Gothic gloom that takes over in me at some point”. But here is another departure for The Mission Song: we are not at all sure this will be Salvo’s fate. Like Kim, he is relentlessly gung-ho (“Onwards” is his motto), and his plucky narrative voice heralds the possibility of more affirmative conclusions.
Pluckiness was the keynote of early British spy fiction. The espionage tales of Kipling, William LeQueux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan and others evolved out of nineteenth-century adventure and detective fiction to address the promise and perils of Empire, and most were unabashedly patriotic, imperialist and romantic. (In the case of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, add xenophobic and soap-fetishistic.) They helped shape the ideals and aspirations of “Empire babies” like David Cornwell, who took the name John le Carré for his first novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961. He admits joining British Intelligence as a young man partly because it was “the last church of this Empire theology”. His fictional intelligence agencies, from the “Circus” of George Smiley to the “Service” that employs Salvo, are staffed by similar Empire babies intent on protecting the nation while its citizens sleep safely at night. Salvo’s supervisor, an ageing Anglican named Anderson, inspires him with language straight out of Buchan: “You’re about to meet some of those ruffians in the flesh and do a bit of good for your country while you’re about it”.
In the 1950s, James Bond represented the last gasp of these fantasy figures, at least in fiction. Bond was as much a parody of the type as its avatar, signifying a wider recognition that such idealism was insubstantial. Le Carré’s own experiences led him to write about the amorality of espionage, in which paranoid dreams often replace reality, and abstract corporate principles tend to trump lived experience. His unflinching dissection of the seamier side of spying was indebted to precedents set by others. As early as 1907, Conrad challenged the romantic-adventure school of spy fiction by exposing the mundane and heartless aspects of the secret agent, and this move towards dis-abused realism was continued by W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, and Graham Greene. Le Carré distinguished himself by making the “controlled schizophrenia” of the spy stand for the modern human condition, in which, as Karl Marx observed, “all that is solid melts into air”. Or, as le Carré himself put it, “I entered [British Intelligence] in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka”.
A Kafkaesque spirit of absurdity does permeate his novels, but whereas Kafka relentlessly undermines everything his protagonists take to be secure, le Carré endows his with one touchstone within the flux of modernity: their conscience. In a 1969 interview, he claimed his outlook was that of a Romantic, adding that “by romanticism I understand that one identifies one’s private standards and adheres to them. This doesn’t lead one to solid conclusions, and it doesn’t restrain one with intellectual discipline. It leaves you on your own”. Many of his protagonists aspire to the sort of integration of thought and feeling, conscience and right action found in the early Romantics. Nevertheless, “Romantic” seems the wrong word to describe such central characters as George Smiley, Magnus Pym, Justin Quayle, or Bruno Salvador. They are too earnest, too dutiful, too haunted by morality in their amoral pursuits to be remotely Byronic. If anything, they are more akin to the immediate antecedents of the European Romantics, the German Pietists and English Protestants. His flawed heroes yearn for a calling, scrutinize their conscience for signs of salvation and seek the betterment of the commonweal. (In le Carré’s autobiographical A Perfect Spy, 1986, Magnus Pym is named after John Pym, one of the great Puritan opponents of Charles I.) There were many nonconformist aspects about David Cornwell’s upbringing – his father was a conman – but Nonconformism in the religious sense was also a significant factor. In interviews, le Carré often lapses into theological language. He once hailed George Smiley’s tendency to doubt as “a rather religious commitment – doubt, in a sense, is anti-ecclesiastic”. As for heroism, he claimed that it “lies . . . not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian saviour”. Even the topical political messages that inform many of his books stem from a residual religious impulse: “I’ve always been slightly moralistic and puritanical about making contributions, doing something useful”.
Indeed, the fact that Salvo is a Roman Catholic has far less relevance for his ultimate salvation than the fact that he happens to be reading Cromwell, Our Chief of Men at a pivotal moment in his life. He is reading it in a restaurant where a woman is loudly regaling her table with banal observations about the world, art and her gynaecologist. Diners at the other tables suffer in silence, until one “little gentleman”, sitting by himself, suddenly rises:
“I will speak”, he announced defiantly into the middle air.
“I owe it to myself. Therefore I shall” – a statement of personal principle, addressed to himself and no one else.
The little gentleman confronts the noisy table about its decibel level, leaving Salvo to ask himself why he had not acted. The memory of this man’s action comes back to him when he discovers that the Syndicate’s plot has nothing to do with helping the Congolese, and everything to do with stripping the country’s resources and leaving the people to starve. Pricked by his conscience, Salvo is finally driven to foil the Syndicate’s secret mission when he overhears the words of a Mission church song, in which a Christian girl pledges to God she will die rather than sacrifice her virtue. Salvo’s life and the fate of the Congo are now in danger, and The Mission Song races ahead to its stirring conclusion. It is at this point that Salvo must choose resolutely once again, this time between England and Africa, rejecting the trimmer’s Both/And for Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Salvo’s Catholicism is thus a scarlet herring, one that disguises the secular yet fundamentally Protestant spirit that characterizes le Carré’s work.
The Mission Song rarely strikes a false note, although its narrow time frame makes one or two of the narrative twists seem slightly providential. Le Carré has constructed another one of his meticulous plots that satisfies in terms of theme, suspense and style. One is delighted by its satire, and moved by its insistence on the importance of doubt and the necessity of choosing responsibly at every moment. These were Kierkegaard’s themes, and John le Carré’s fiction has always aimed at Fear and Trembling.
