BOOK REVIEW: Agent Running in the Field
by John le Carre
Reviewed by Nick Fishwick
Nick Fishwick CMG retired in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. He did postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, director for counterterrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
John le Carre is not only one of Britain’s greatest living writers of spy thrillers. He is also one of our greatest living writers full stop. From the classic The Spy Who Came in From The Cold in 1963 to Smiley’s People in 1979, le Carre wrote a series of novels centring on British Intelligence during the Cold War. He created a very different world from James Bond, a subtler world of double and triple operations, friends betraying friends, and no one trusting anyone. He used the intelligence game to explore how the British elites managed what looked then like their country’s inexorable decline. He did this so compellingly that many people who would never read an Ian Fleming, a Charles Cumming – or even a Jason Matthews – keep reading le Carre more for what he seems to tell us about the British establishment than for what he says about the spying business.
Mr. le Carre is now very angry about Brexit and the Trump presidency. But his new novel, Agent Running in the Field, is actually a comedy in the classic sense, and I cannot remember a le Carre book as funny as this one. You get grim irony in the earlier novels, but I was surprised to encounter the odd “laugh-out-loud” moment in this one. Part of the key to the success of the comedy is that the narrator, Nat, is thoroughly likeable. He is an MI6 officer in his mid-forties who somehow seems to have joined the service, in the 1990s, without undergoing any sort of selection process, simply because his father was in a posh British Army regiment, or something. Nat is in many ways a rogue – he is an MI6 officer, after all – but will ultimately always do the decent thing. Unlike, apparently, most of his colleagues.
Because this novel works so well as a comedy, it matters less that the plot is preposterous. The story requires an eye-watering coincidence and also simple impossibility (Nat has to pretend socially that he is some kind of businessman: if like real MI6 officers he had pretended to be a diplomat Mr. le Carre’s story would have been sunk) but this gives us some of the funniest moments of the book.
The novel works less well as satire because these days Mr. le Carre can’t quite get close enough to the truth inside British intelligence to hurt. The MI6 that Mr. le Carre portrays here still seems to be run by the same deeply cynical establishment types that he was depicting in the 1960s: quite a lot of the characters here seem to be half-wits and morally defective, and they all seem to speak to each other in nasty ways. There is nothing here relating to a world in which the British intelligence agencies work in close partnership; in which “need to share” has long-since replaced “need to know”; where there are Intelligence and Security Committees, Chilcot reports, CONTEST strategies, National Security Councils and so on. Instead Mr. le Carre still has MI6 using crumbling outstations in odd parts of London. He has leaders who still say things like “old boy”, “pray?” and who use that weird, elliptical spy language favoured by much worse writers than Mr. le Carre (not quoting, but the “Can’t follow it. Odd chap. Know the type” sort of dialogue) which can’t have been used by any real MI6 officer since, say, 1994.
The serious side of the novel hinges on a completely ridiculous supposed Anglo-American joint operation. Mr. le Carre would doubtless say that after Iraq, British intelligence can’t be trusted not to do anything. Well, I doubt if they can turn the US and UK into China and North Korea.
I notice that Mr. le Carre codenames the British intelligence unit in Washington KIM. Of course, Kim Philby was the MI6 head of station in Washington in the 1940s and it was the exposure of the treason of Philby and George Blake in the early 60s that defined Mr. le Carre’s own experience as an MI6 officer at that time, and his subsequent view of intelligence. Mr. le Carre knows that British intelligence has changed since then but he doesn’t really know how.
None of this detracts from what is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Mr. le Carre writes pretty much as well as ever and by channeling his anger through comedy he makes his points, gets away with the fantasy plot and some two-dimensional characters and delivers a novel that will be enjoyed - even by MI6 officers.
Agent Running in the Field book earns a solid three out of four trench coats.
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