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Sep. 14th, 2023 11:19 pmI read John le Carré's Our Game last week on a recommendation and a whim, and have been thinking about it intermittently ever since.
The protagonist of this one is Tim Cranmer, who has recently retired into the countryside to make mediocre wine near where his friend Larry teaches at university. Tim and Larry of course are both also, of course, ex-spies, put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War. Larry was a dramatic and idealistic double agent, and Tim was his cool-headed handler, the man who recruited him, and gave him everything he needed, and ensured that at the end of the day he always remembered what side he was actually supposed to be on. They have been intimately entwined for most of their lives, and at the time the story begins, the police have just come knocking on Tim's door to ask him about Larry's disappearance.
This kicks off Tim's obsessive, off-the-books quest to find out what has actually become of his [best?] [friend?] and all the money that Larry seems to have possibly collaborated with his former Soviet handler to steal from the Russian government For Some Reason. And then Tim will ... do what about it? and why? great questions! with no good answers!
If you are perhaps thinking all this sounds a bit homoerotic: Tim is asked about this at intermittent points throughout the book! 'ha ha,' he says whenever he is asked, 'how funny, no, I assure you, Larry is very straight.' Oh, well then.
"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
Unlike the le Carrés that I've read before, this book is a claustrophobic two-hander -- or more accurately a three-hander, if you take into account Tim's much-younger girlfriend Emma, who [like Larry] is a creative and idealistic person that Tim, who claims no ideals and believes in nothing, has made much of supporting; who is a person but also a foil and a reflection -- or perhaps most accurately of all a one-hander, because the actual Larry and Emma are both in the book much, much less than Tim's feelings and ideas about Larry and Emma and all the things he's projecting onto them. We're deep in first-person narration here, and Tim is not telling us everything, and even when he thinks he is he's absolutely not reliable about it.
( spoilers )
I got into a discussion with one of my coworkers while reading this book about whether le Carré was a nihilist and a misanthrope, or [my position] a nihilist who in fact quite likes people, which makes it worse. The absence of a cause, the void at the heart of the work of espionage, is profoundly central to this book -- we're in 1995 now, the Cold War is over, and everyone has to live with what they did for the sake of ensuring several terrible superpowers can now live together in commercial amity, at the expense of various others. Tim starts out the book scoffing at Larry and Emma's ideals and their search for meaning, for some kind of ethical stand to make in an unethical world, but his own hunt for Larry is more or less the same kind of search for meaning. & I don't think le Carré thinks there's any meaning to be found anywhere, but he does have profound empathy for the searchers and all the terrible mistakes they make along the way.
The protagonist of this one is Tim Cranmer, who has recently retired into the countryside to make mediocre wine near where his friend Larry teaches at university. Tim and Larry of course are both also, of course, ex-spies, put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War. Larry was a dramatic and idealistic double agent, and Tim was his cool-headed handler, the man who recruited him, and gave him everything he needed, and ensured that at the end of the day he always remembered what side he was actually supposed to be on. They have been intimately entwined for most of their lives, and at the time the story begins, the police have just come knocking on Tim's door to ask him about Larry's disappearance.
This kicks off Tim's obsessive, off-the-books quest to find out what has actually become of his [best?] [friend?] and all the money that Larry seems to have possibly collaborated with his former Soviet handler to steal from the Russian government For Some Reason. And then Tim will ... do what about it? and why? great questions! with no good answers!
If you are perhaps thinking all this sounds a bit homoerotic: Tim is asked about this at intermittent points throughout the book! 'ha ha,' he says whenever he is asked, 'how funny, no, I assure you, Larry is very straight.' Oh, well then.
"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
Unlike the le Carrés that I've read before, this book is a claustrophobic two-hander -- or more accurately a three-hander, if you take into account Tim's much-younger girlfriend Emma, who [like Larry] is a creative and idealistic person that Tim, who claims no ideals and believes in nothing, has made much of supporting; who is a person but also a foil and a reflection -- or perhaps most accurately of all a one-hander, because the actual Larry and Emma are both in the book much, much less than Tim's feelings and ideas about Larry and Emma and all the things he's projecting onto them. We're deep in first-person narration here, and Tim is not telling us everything, and even when he thinks he is he's absolutely not reliable about it.
( spoilers )
I got into a discussion with one of my coworkers while reading this book about whether le Carré was a nihilist and a misanthrope, or [my position] a nihilist who in fact quite likes people, which makes it worse. The absence of a cause, the void at the heart of the work of espionage, is profoundly central to this book -- we're in 1995 now, the Cold War is over, and everyone has to live with what they did for the sake of ensuring several terrible superpowers can now live together in commercial amity, at the expense of various others. Tim starts out the book scoffing at Larry and Emma's ideals and their search for meaning, for some kind of ethical stand to make in an unethical world, but his own hunt for Larry is more or less the same kind of search for meaning. & I don't think le Carré thinks there's any meaning to be found anywhere, but he does have profound empathy for the searchers and all the terrible mistakes they make along the way.
