Absolute Friends
By John Le Carré
Little, Brown
HC, 455 pg. US$26.95
ISBN: 0-3160-0064-7

Espionage dressed up with editorial 

By Steven Martinovich
web posted January 19, 2004

John Le Carré has never shied away from the notion that a spy
novel should contain a core message, something to debate after
the story is finished. From the beginning of his career as a writer
his protagonists have fought a battle that seemed to be as much
about dealing with the uncomfortable moral questions raised by
espionage as from the consequences of their actions. His spies
have always been multidimensional characters who asked
questions of themselves and authority, far from the automatons
that grace the works of other lesser writers.

The hero of his latest work Absolute Friends, is one Ted Mundy.
Born of an English officer in Pakistan, Mundy eventually finds
himself in England at school where he discovers a love for the
German language. After a brief spell at Oxford, Mundy travels to
Berlin in 1969 just in time to participate in student protests. It is
there that he meets Sasha, the intellectual leader of a student
commune. With Ted without a family and Sasha having rejected
his, the two men begin a friendship that intertwines them for the
next three decades. With the skill of a writer who has long
practiced his craft, Le Carré convincingly paints a portrait of a
Berlin and its anarchist movements.

After being arrested by West German police after a protest and
ejected from the country, Mundy finds himself back in England
where he becomes a teacher at a prep school. A failed writer,
Mundy eventually lands himself a job with the British Council,
which promotes cultural and artistic ties between Britain and
Europe, and while on a trip to East Germany meets up with
Sasha again. His friend is now a dissatisfied member of the East
German secret police who decides to involve Ted in a scheme:
He will pretend to recruit Mundy for the Stasi but will really be
passing along secrets to the West. The two men are successful in
their operation until the fateful year 1989 when the collapse of
Communism changes the world as they know it.

Unfortunately Absolute Friends goes off the rails at this point.
What was carefully crafted story of friendship and espionage
gives way to wild polemic on current events. Le Carré, who
made headlines last year with an essay arguing against the Iraq
War, turns his novel into a screed blasting the United States and
England. Le Carré's voice takes over Ted and Sasha's with
statements on the war like "That war on Iraq was illegitimate... it
was a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link
with al-Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity
and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial war
dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was
launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical
fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-
Nine Eleven psychopathy." Le Carré, through Mundy, argues the
United States is a "renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat
the rest of the world as its allotment." What was a spy novel
turns quickly and disappointingly into an extended opinion essay.

Absolute Friends collapses in the final section of the book which
sees Ted recruited by Sasha to work for a mysterious billionaire
eager to promote his vision of the world. The climax, which
strains credibility and the reader's patience, paints America's
determination to silence its enemies and dissent in a cartoonish
manner, devoid of any plausibility. In Le Carré's world, the most
dangerous animal is the United States. Where ideologies were
once the most threatening force, it is now the current resident of
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Absolute Friends could have
engaged in serious debate about the post-September 11 world
but Le Carré preferred instead a one-sided discussion, much like
his anarchist Berlin students earlier in the novel.
 
Absolute Friends shows quite clearly that Le Carré is still
capable of creating interesting stories and characters. That said,
it is a failure not because of his opposition to the Iraq War, the
United States and excesses in the war against terrorism, but
because Le Carré seemed more interested in a strident screed
proclaiming his beliefs than debating the moral issues that
underpins his characters' actions. Absolute Friends could have
prompted the reader to ask themselves the same questions that
many of Le Carré earlier characters have but instead he choose
to preach to what he hopes will be his choir.
 
Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario,
Canada.

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