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| Sunday, 4 April 2004 |
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The shattered looking glass Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE Can John le Carre's latest novel (gripping though it is like all of le Carre's works) hope to compete with the blood and thunder of the political platform or the results of the General Election which will be pouring in even as these lines are being read this Sunday morning? Can the fictional spy world which is Carre invokes hope to compete with the real life drama of a Sri Lankan hustings? However short the odds may be on this happening and art having to retreat before life it is the humble submission of this columnist that what le Carre has to say about life in the present unipolar world ruled by Uncle Sam will continue to be tenable and valid long after the dust has settled on the present election and the last of the war cries has faded from the battlements. The 'Absolute Friends' of le Carre's present title are Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born with the birth of Pakistan and Sasha, the son of an East German pastor who meet in West Berlin in 1968, the magical year of the great student rebellions which manage to rock but not quite dislodge the western democracies of France, the US, Britain and West Germany in that year of the barricades. Like most of le Carre's heroes and anti-heroes the two ultimately become spies, Mundy in the guise of a British Council functionary managing cultural tours to the Soviet Bloc and Sasha as a characteristic double agent. Their latest adventure is set in the post-Cold War, post-September 11 world where the witch hunt is in full cry for wicked Arab terrorists demonically determined to upset President Bush's apple cart. In Ted Mundy le Carre has surely created a prototypical hero of our confused times, a tragic-comic portrait of an Englishman of his time and his class caught inexorably in the tide of events of the Cold War World. Mundy's father is a captain of the Indian Army and Mundy himself is something of a historical rarity because as his father does not tire of explaining in the pub over his pint, his wife had gone into labour in India but the son had been born in Pakistan somewhat in the manner of Rushdi's children who had been born on the stroke of Indian Independence. He is reared in genteel poverty by his father who is compelled to give up his commission in the Pakistani Army when he assaults a fellow officer and is educated at a minor public school where he is head prefect and plays Cricket. It is only after his father's death that the fiction which the elder Mundy has so zealously nurtured about his son's birth is revealed to Mundy and this self-revelation obviously runs parallel in his private life with the collapse of the British Empire in the public sphere and Britain's consequent diminutive status in the post-war world. Born in an outpost of the British Empire and brought up by a Muslim Ayah, suddenly uprooted and hastily transplanted in the Home Counties, this Cricket-playing minor public schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate is thus the archetypal outsider as he flirts with anarchism in Europe and spies for his country and his flag. The novelist captures perfectly the pathos of the middle-class in the post-war British Welfare State struggling to cope with its wounded sense of self-esteem brought about by the loss of Empire. Mundy lurches from one misadventure to another and there are some hilarious touches such as his final job as an English language tour guide in a Bavarian castle. Life then is sad and comic in turns and in our befuddled times there are no heroes or villains but merely confused mortals strutting and fretting as the spymasters pull their strings. Sasha on the other hand is a child of Europe between the wars. His father is a fierce Lutheran pastor who had done an amazing transition from Nazism to Communism and from there to Christian capitalism thus capturing within himself all the great historical and ideological forces which had fought for the European soul during the previous century. The unctuous Her Pastor (as the son scathingly calls him) sees no difficulty in switching his devotion from Hitler to Stalin and from Stalin to Wall Street preaching each of these gospels with the same zeal. It is his father's monumental chicanery which drives Sasha (who is born with uneven shoulders too narrow for his head) to embrace anarchism and become a fiery leader and orator of the student movement in West Germany in the 1960s. Through the interlocking stories of these two men who both revolted against their fathers le Carre unfolds the tale of a world caught between the end of the Second World War and the expiry of the Cold War brought about by the death of Communism and the collapse of the Berlin Wall which plays not an over small role in the present narrative. Bundy as a British agent specialising in the Warsaw Pact countries and Sasha as an East German cultural bureaucrat serving both Cold War masters are placed at the centre of the web. What is intriguing about the story, however, and what makes le Carre such a master of the contemporary event and the detail is the twist he gives his tale taking it back to the student revolt of 1968 which brought the two absolute friends together and relocating the relationship in the present post-September 11 world. Now that Communism has been put to rout or more accurately made to commit suicide and Arab terrorism has become the main enemy how does the spy conduct the new battle? The new route which le Carre opens as an answer is a withering indictment of the military-industrial complex which has taken over and colonised the world's mind brainwashing it with its neo-conservative orthodoxy and sanitising it in the cause of Coca-colonialism and the MacDonaldisation of the world. To prise open this closed global mind Sasha, the unrepentant agitator (in his maverick wanderings he is even credited with a short spell in Sri Lanka where he had been a lecturer in Kandy) and his diabolical mentor Dmitri plan an audacious assault although to go into details would be to give away the plot (in more senses than the merely literary). However let us for a moment allow Sasha to speak in his own voice where he sketches out the following contemporary scenario. They are trying to put us into one bed. Liberals, Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, anarchists, antiglobalists, peace protesters: we are all sympis, all pinkos. We all hate Jews and America and we are secret admirers of Osama 'Or again'. 'The liberal left will be exposed as the closest fascist bastards they've always been, and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe will go crawling to its American Big Brother, begging it to come to its protection.' So under America's global hegemony everybody who is not for the USA is viewed as being against it and what is more in the camp of Arab terrorism hence the obsession with Osama and Saddam even though Weapons of Mass Destruction have yet to be unearthed from the rubble of Iraq. In the last chapter's Carre is quite withering about the media which has not only acquiesced in this American dominance but has become its accomplice in persuading its audience to accept this perfidious fiction. All these elements combine to make this le Carre's most overtly political novel to date but there is also another element, a loss of innocence. For the world of the spy, however labyrinthine and insidious it might be, has its own code of honour but with the end of the Cold War this code of honour is abandoned. It is now each man for himself with no certainty that there is even a God to side with the strongest. This is the feeling implicit in the final isolation of Mundy and what is more his control Amory who stands for all the old world values of the game as against the predatoriness of the American Rourke. In that sense 'Absolute Friends' is not only a political polemic against the unipolar world but also a final salute to a lost age of innocence which Mundy identifies as Amory's brand of 'enlightened patriotism.' |
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