Agent Running in the Field

June 1, 2019

Still capturing the zeitgeist in thriller mode, Le Carré takes us to 2018 London, where a lone-wolf 26-year-old is determined to avoid the political earthquakes defining these times. Alas, the harder he struggles to disengage, the more deeply and dangerously he becomes enmeshed. Le Carré's recent A Legacy of Spies was a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 2, 2019
Bestseller le Carré’s first spy thriller to focus on the Trump era disappoints. Nat, a 25-year veteran of MI6, is afraid that he’s about to be put out to pasture. Instead, he’s offered the opportunity to take over the management of a derelict London intelligence substation, the Haven, “a dumping ground for resettled defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informants on the skids.” Nat accepts, and advocates for a new subordinate’s covert op aimed at a Ukranian oligarch code-named Orson, who has close links to “pro-Putin elements in the Ukranian Government.” The straightforward operation against Orson ends up becoming complicated and includes an obligatory mole hunt. Meanwhile, Nat befriends Ed Shannon, an agent for another branch of British intelligence, who reveals himself to be a strident opponent of Britain’s leaving the E.U. and a believer that Trump is leading the U.S. toward fascism. Le Carré (A Legacy of Spies) telegraphs the book’s twist early on, and Nat is colorless compared with Magnus Pym and the author’s other nuanced leads. This is a missed opportunity. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown.

September 15, 2019
Now that he's revisited and deepened the tissue of double-crosses that put him on the map with George Smiley, le Carré (A Legacy of Spies, 2017, etc.), evergreen at 87, turns to an equally hapless new hero in the age of Trump and Brexit. "I'm a field man," says Nat, a Secret Intelligence Service agent, "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 as the only alternative to being put out to pasture for good: assuming command of Haven, the London substation he describes to his unenthusiastic wife, human rights lawyer Prudence, as "a Mickey Mouse outfit" where his job will be "either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard." No sooner has Nat sunk into this forgettable ambit than three disquieting developments arise. Florence, a probationer who's his nominal second-in-command, angrily quits over the unexplained cancellation of a project she's designed, spearheaded, and pitched to the powers that be. Sergei Kusnetsev, a Russian defector who's become a sleeper agent for Her Majesty's Government, is contacted by Anastasia, a Russian agent who presumably either wants to put him to work, if she trusts him, or to expose him, if she doesn't. And Ed Shannon, the much-younger researcher who joined Nat's athletic club in order to play badminton with him and vent about the folly of Brexit and the rise of neo-Nazism in the States, suddenly appears in an alarming new role. Seeing the world as he knows it--not the new world order or the special relationship, but his own faded patch of it--threatened from every corner, Nat, determined to assert himself one last time, hatches a rickety plan to keep the pot from boiling over. A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.

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Starred review from September 15, 2019
Le Carr� returns to two of his most resonant themes: idealistic naifs whose attempts to right a wrong world lead to disaster, and disenchanted spies forced to draw lines in the sand, risking everything to keep one more naif from falling prey to in-fighting institutions and their minions. It all starts, improbably, on a badminton court, where veteran British agent-runner Nat, nearing 50 and facing a dreary homefront assignment after years in the field, encounters shuttlecock-obsessed Ed, who challenges Nat to a game. A friendship grows on and off the court, as the twentysomething Ed pontificates about his hatred of Brexit and Trump, even as Nat strives to focus on badminton. We know from the first that Ed is more than he seems, but neither we nor Nat have any sense of what is to come. Meanwhile, Nat attempts to resurrect his career by corralling a Russian spy trolling for a double agent in London. As always, it is fascinating to watch the tradecraft play out (le Carr� remains a master at showing us what spies do, wily spiders to the unsuspecting flies they entrap), but that darker strain present in varying degrees throughout this seminal espionage novelist's oeuvre?the inescapable conclusion that individual lives, not evil empires, are the real prey that spies and governments devour?overshadows all else. As Nat reflects in the novel's ominous last line, a kind of epitaph for a spy, "I had wanted to tell him I was a decent man, but it was too late."HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Le Carr�, who has been writing for 55 years and has remained atop best-seller lists throughout most of that period, remains the gold standard for spy novelists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)