Carre (Hodder & Stoughton) €18.99 MANY PEOPLE have asked how such a massive "intelligence failure" could have led to the patently false claim that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. But we need look no further than four decades of John Le Carre's best-sellers to find out that deceit and double-dealing by the intelligence services, and not "failure", are responsible.
Le Carre has been wrongly pigeon-holed as a "cold war warrior". The super power conflicts that he described in his famous earlier novels were never good-against-evil cartoon jobs. His novels were far more ambiguous, shadowy and neutral than, for instance, lan Fleming's.
Le Carre was also wrongly written off as a observer of international power politics in his last two novels he has produced fiction about the epic global struggle between the two new "super powers" - a US-led militarism based on corporate power and the
In The Constant Gardener he attacked the multinationals, in a riveting plot about the death-dealing pharmaceutical giants. It implicitly posed the global justice movement as an alternative, referencing Seattle barely months after it had occurred.
Similarly, Absolute Friends is an assault on the war drive with special venom reserved for Blair - who, Le Carre states, should be driven from office for taking to country war on the basis of a lie.
The plot is set in 2003, after the Iraq invasion. It's main characters - Mundy and Sasha - meet up after a long gap in their friendship. The book then flashes back.
Through their histories, Le Carre hurtles the global justice movement. with students raging against their parents' ries Kate, a socialist teacher who evolves into a Blairite moderniser through battles sub-plot of some personal interest to me before getting a safe Northern seat. global politics - name-checking a dozen of Marxist intellectuals along the way, bringing us right up to date with the leading voices of
The radicalism of each main character arises from their childhood circumstancesMundy born to an English major in the final days of colonial rule in India is disgusted at British connivance at partition, Sasha is an East German revolted at his father's journey from Nazism, through Stalinism to free market capitalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. But the
The two meet in a Berlin squat in 1968, complicity in Nazism and the Vietnam War. After a street battle with the police, Mundy is deported back to London where he marwith Marxists in St Pancras Labour Party (a
Le CARRÉ ending of the cold war and the imposition of a US-led new world order revives their radicalism. As Sacha says in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall "you think the (cold) war's over because a bunch of old Nazis in East Germany have traded Lenin for Coca-Cola. Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place? It will pick it dry".
Through this story and the political
N odyssey of the two protagonists, Le C is simultaneously po traying the deep polit cal roots for the curre war drive and of the g eration that is strugglin against it - cheering on February 15 march as "t largest anti-war demonst tion the world has ever seen". The book poses the que tion of whether another Europe is possible - one not based on capitalism or American imperialism. Mundy and Sasha's explicit socialism is one that rejects neo-liberalism and Stalinism in favour of a mon idealistic future based on freedo self-determination, integrity and respect for difference. It is not Le Carre's best work. F seems to have such a huge amount to say a short time, that sometimes this gets in th way of plot and character.
But Absolute Friends is a different type o writing than in some of his other bookswith an engagement, political anger and infectious energy more common in an author of 23 than 73.