Free Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor Page A

worst of his race, Churchill was a lesser man than his biographer.

10
The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold
     
    O F THE MANY UNPREDICTABLE, AND SOMETIMES CALAMITOUS , consequences of the end of the Cold War, the one with the most impact on the world's readers has been the sudden collapse of the rich lode mined for four decades by the world's spy novelists. The shadowy, sinister, and occasionally explosive shenanigans of secret agents contending on the margins of the superpower standoff provided page-turning grist to many a literary mill. Entire reputations were built on Cold War fiction. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the more anxious questions that arose amid the rubble was, “What will John Le Carré write about now?”
    The Night Manager
and
The Secret Pilgrim
provided part of the answer, but they were still in the genre, a coda to the last kick of the cold warriors. Le Carré’s next novel,
Our Game,
offered a more conclusive response. Not only was it Le Carré’s first truly post–Cold War book, but its release was accompanied by a flurry of nonfiction articles and interviews in which the author explicitly spelled out his own view ofthe new world order. The presumed distance between narrative fiction and the politics of the narrator has thus been eliminated.
Our Game
is about Le Carré’s game, what one might call his new word order. And that is both its most intriguing feature and its most crippling handicap.
    Timothy Cranmer, Le Carré’s protagonist, is a retired British counterespionage agent living in sybaritic luxury in the Somerset countryside with a beautiful young musician, Emma Manzini. The end of the Cold War has made him surplus to requirements, as it has the “joe” he used to run as a double agent, Larry Pettifer. Larry, an agent of passion and reckless charm, is now a professor at Bath University, giving lectures on such subjects as “The Squandered Victory: Western Foreign Policy since 1988.” At the novel's beginning, Larry has disappeared; so, we soon discover, has Emma, whom Cranmer had reluctantly introduced to the irresistible Larry.
    The plot thickens like Yeltsin's waistline, and at the time of Le Carré’s writing, it was just as topical. Larry's old KGB contact Checheyev, a Muslim from the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia in the northern Caucasus, has milked his ex-Soviet employers of $37 million and is apparently using it, with Larry's help, to acquire arms to finance an Ingush rebellion against Moscow. Cranmer, suspected by his former colleagues of involvement in Larry's misdeeds, sets out to find his friend and his ex-lover, a journey that returns him to the spy's life of death and double-dealing.
    At one level, the device of Cranmer's quest for Larry and Emma keeps the pages turning, drawing the reader into the chase that is a classic staple of the genre. But Cranmer is amaddeningly elusive spy-hero: he cannot remember whether he has killed Larry in a fight, he cannot guess what the money might have been stolen for, he stretches out deductions he might have made much earlier from clues already in his possession. When is a thriller not a thriller? In this case, when it has no surprises, when it eschews action, when it even sidesteps a climactic battle toward which it seems to have been building, and when its principal leitmotif is not the gripping yarn of the blurbs but a political harangue from the op-ed pages.
    For it was, in fact, in a philippic in the
New York Times
op-ed page the previous December that Le Carré nailed his colors to the mast: “Having won the cold war, the West can't afford to walk away from the consequences of its victory: whether we are speaking of Bosnia today, Chechnya or Ingushetia tomorrow or Cuba the day after.” His fierce assault on the West's current policy toward Russia was followed by an article in the
New York Times Book Review
describing the spirit in which he had embarked on this novel. “The West, it seemed to me, had dishonored every