Book review
John Le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, now out in paperback, is packed with tension. It’s also powered by a sustained anger with the high-level bureaucracy that extends its cold fingers to touch the people who do a real job. After a very few pages, you come to realise that this chilling fingerprint from the men of power can be lethal. The spymasters of old have given way to a club of self-seeking bureaucrats for whom small moves of political advantage are far more important that the survival or otherwise of someone sent out on a solitary and always dangerous job.
In this book, Le Carré tightens the tension by centring the plot round an unwitting couple, Perry and Gail, who treat themselves to a posh weekend of playing tennis on the Isle of Antigua, with no more imagined risk than overdoing the gin and tonic. They are not expecting to meet an ebullient Russian, covered with tattoos, a huge man who does everything on an outrageously large scale. Dima (the affectionate diminutive of Dmitri) moves in a world of money, passion and crime, and yet has a theatrical seam of vulnerability that is immensely attractive. He is surrounded by a large family, most of whom seem obscurely upset, and when one of two very silent little girls slips her hand into Gail’s, Gail knows she is helplessly involved. Dima tells Perry he wants a sympathetic ear at a high level of British diplomacy, and the innocent tennis-playing British couple realise with horror that he means Intelligence with a capital I. Their efforts to be sensible and remain uninvolved are swept away. They try to cut the holiday short and get an early flight home, but the planes are fully booked. Gail learns that the silent little girls are newly orphaned, their parents having died in a ‘car crash’ that in fact involved a hail of bullets, blamed on the Chechens – useful scapegoats in the violent world of new Russian commerce.
The reader, as helplessly as Gail and Perry themselves, is then ushered into a Whitehall office with suave men, one of whom is an amusing, lone-wolf maverick much loathed by the more established club members. The tennis-playing couple, scrupulous and decent as they are, find themselves sandwiched between dangers like people groping between the close walls of a dark alley. On one side is the unknown chessboard of secret European intrigues, on the other, the politics of the British boardroom. As the pages turn, the tension tightens.
The ending must of course remain top secret. By the time it comes, the reader is steeling him or herself for something not good – but no matter how many potential denouements have been juggled with, the shock is like a sudden punch. Le Carré is in a class of his own, a brilliant, disturbing writer with a mordant eye on the way we live (and die) now.
Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carré, Penguin, £7.99 ISBN 9780141049168.
You can see a video of Le Carré himself reading an excerpt from the book if you go to Penguin Books/ Authors.
