This is a very long
book, 640 pages of reasonably spaced text in my edition. Published in 1983, the
story is set within the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The setting remains much as it was, nothing much has changed there. The book
does not have a dated feel at all, which is surprising given that it mobilises
a great deal of then-current contextual information.
It is not the most
popular of le Carre’s books and one can see why. Though an enthusiast, my attention weakened
during Chapters 6 and 7 which record an extraordinarily long and intense
interrogation of Charlie, the main character, by agents of the Israeli security
services. It is only much later in the book that the pace quickens and we are
hooked into a Who will Survive and Who will Die narrative. I made it to the
end. Like A Perfect Spy, it is a
novel of great emotional intensity.
Google won’t tell me who
it was who said that the same causes which make one person a Protestant on this
side of the Pyrenees would have made them a Catholic on the other. I think it
was Voltaire but maybe it was John Stuart Mill. But le Carre’s novel could be
thought of as a prolonged, and profound, exploration of that theme. He finds a
way of showing how one could believe at the same time both in Israel and the
Palestinian cause. Know enough, learn enough, and you will find your loyalties
totally divided. Only ignorance or accident of birth on this side or the other
side of the Golan Heights could lead you to plump uncritically one way or the
other.
He achieves this result
by inserting his main character into both sides of the conflict. She is
recruited into the Israeli cause, as their agent, partly on the basis of her
public espousal of the Palestinian cause. This makes it possible for her to act
credibly when she is inserted deep into a Palestinian terrorist group, but that then also
puts her in tension with her sponsors and her agent-runner, Israeli Joseph who
doubles as Palestinian Michel until both are totally confused in Charlie’s mind.
All this is very well done, in detail and in depth. And I read the conclusion
of the book as at best ambiguous and more likely as an expression of the view
that, joker or thief, there is no way out of here. That’s the legacy of what is now a long century of history.
