It’s a Mystery: “Honor among thieves, perhaps, honor among spies, never”

Agent Running in the Field
By John le Carré
Viking, 2019

A new John le Carré, a generous dram of lagavulin, my time-worn reading chair and absolute quiet—it doesn’t get any better than that! As anyone worth their trench coat knows, le Carré is the gold standard among spy novelists.. He’s been at it full time since1964, the year he left MI6, the foreign branch of the British Security Service, because his career exploded with the publication of his third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.” The new one, “Agent Running in the Field,” takes place in the Britain of Brexit and Boris Johnson, both very bad dudes as far as le Carré is concerned. He calls Brexit  “…sheer bloody lunacy”. (Don’t get him started on Trump, who he labels “Putin’s shithouse cleaner.”) One of my favorite le Carré anecdotes comes from The Tailor of Panama, his 1996 novel about a charismatic bespoke tailor, transplanted from London, and an MI6 officer before the American handover of the Panama Canal on December 31, 1999. It’s a novel with a decidedly rum-soaked satirical edge. As the tailor fits the spy for a pair of trousers, he asks, “And we dress, sir?” – The tailor adds: “Most of my gentlemen seem to favour left these days. I don’t think it’s political.” With this esteemed author, I wouldn’t bet on that. Nothing, repeat nothing, is accidental. 

As he said recently about his days running agents for MI6 in the early 1960s, what he looked for in a candidate was a “sense of larceny.” What mattered above all was that the agent was “Somebody who enjoys the adventure and is not scrupulous about small stuff.” And as he has said elsewhere, “Forget blackmail. Forget macho. Forget sleep deprivation, locking people in boxes, simulated executions and other enhancements: the best agents, snitches, Joes, informants or whatever you want to call them, I pontificated, needed patience, understanding, and loving care….A spy’s memory is his only friend in the world.” Or as he said in The Looking Glass War (1965): “There is no terror so consistent, so elusive to describe, as that which haunts a spy in a strange country.” All of which he employs to his advantage with his intriguing and slightly hapless new hero Nat.

“I’m a field man,” says Nat, an agent for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service known to the initiated as The Office, “not a desk jockey, not a social carer.” Convinced at 47 that his years running spies throughout Europe are over, he accepts one last assignment in lieu of being put out to pasture for good. He assumes command of Haven. As he grimly describes it to his less than enthusiastic wife Prudence, a human rights lawyer who has been through the wars with him:

It’s one of those run-down London substations that’s been resting on its laurels since the glory days of the Cold War and not producing anything worth a damn…. It’s a dumping ground for resettled defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informers on the skids…and my job will be either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.”

The only bright spot in this ragtag band of spies he’s inherited is Florence. She’s his nominal second-in-command. For her project that she calls Operation Rosebud she has recruited Astra, the discontented mistress of a London-based Ukrainian oligarch codenamed Orson. He has well-documented links to both Moscow Centre and pro-Putin elements in the Ukrainian Government. (How prescient!) 

Her aggressive plan called for a Head Office stealth team to break into Orson’s vulgarly expensive Park Lane duplex and bug it to the rafters. Astra, not so incidentally, has the night porter in her silken pocket. Moreover, the further Nat delves into Rosebud, the more convinced he becomes that with ruthless timing it can deliver actionable high-grade intelligence. (It’s worth noting that this gives Citizen Kane a new lease on life).

When he’s not spying, Nat is a passionate badminton player. This brings one Ed Shannon to him. Ed works at a soulless media agency and joined Nat’s athletic club to play badminton with him. Or so he says.  He’s virulently anti-Brexit and considers Trump responsible for the rise of neo-Nazism in the States. He turns into an alarming catalyst in Nat’s life that almost causes irreparable harm to all the players. It is so wonderfully typical of le Carré to introduce a character who goes from mildly innocuous to rampantly pivotal. 

Agent Running in the Field is, among other things, a brilliantly multilayered examination of the disillusionment of aging spies. It turns a merciless eye on their secrets and their defections from the causes they once espoused. It lays bare at its center one of the author’s core beliefs: “Promise nothing you can’t take back.”

The ending, if you can call it that, is ambiguous, unpredictable, deliciously outrageous. In good spy novels, there is no such thing as a clean getaway. But always with le Carré you get one helluva ride. 

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.