Author's anger at Iraq war drives Orwellian world view of his latest spy novel

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

	HEATHER MCKINNON / THE SEATTLE TIMES
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John le Carré's smoldering new novel, "Absolute Friends," will raise a question for its readers. Can a writer, however accomplished, use his novels in the service of making a political statement?

Since "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" was published in the 1960s, Le Carré's stories have exposed the covert, subterranean ways of power. The Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, international drug companies, arms dealers; all have been spotlighted in le Carré's books.

"Absolute Friends," already published in Britain and Australia, has ignited controversy there because le Carré has used his outrage at the United States' war with Iraq to propel the plot. A defining quality of le Carré's Cold War novels, notably the "Smiley's People" trilogy, was the author's ethical ambivalence towards all sides. There's no ambivalence toward the bad guys in "Absolute Friends." Le Carré is an angry man, believing that the Iraq war has been a master deception — ostensibly about terrorism, really about oil, greed and religion — perpetrated on Americans by their leaders. That belief relentlessly propels the fates of the characters in this troubling story.

The protagonist in "Absolute Friends" is Ted Mundy, an Englishman exiled to Germany. Mundy, obscurely seedy and down on his luck, gives tours at the Linderhof, a castle built by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. He lives with his young Turkish partner, Zara, and her 11-year-old son, Mustafa: "a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example."

"Absolute Friends" by John le Carré br> Little, Brown, $26.95

Mundy is a child of imperialism, British version. His father was a major in the British infantry, serving in a part of the Hindu Kush that became Pakistan. His mother — well, that's a bit murky. Mundy's ayah (caretaker), a Muslim, is the mother of his life, a woman who lost her entire family, "murdered in the great massacres that came of the Partition."

Dad loses his job when the Brits pull out: " 'Madame history a very fickle lady, sir' — in the telegramese later inherited by his son — 'you can march for her day and night. Sweat your guts for her. ... Doesn't make a blind bit o'difference. The day she doesn't want you — out. Dismiss. Scrapheap. Enough said.' "

The young Mundy, raised in a sun-drenched climate, is shipped home: "The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a 40-watt bulb."

In Mundy, le Carré has created a character, like others in his pantheon, whose great need for approval draws exploiters like flies to honey. Mundy's "real enemy is his own good-heartedness and his inextinguishable need to belong. Perhaps only those who have had no mother can understand the emptiness he has to fill," le Carré writes. His easygoing charm eases him through boarding school; he links up with a professor who awakens in him a love of German culture.

Mundy ships off to university in Berlin and is caught up in the Bader-Meinhof era of student radicalism (they congregate at a nightclub called The Shaven Cat, a name that somehow distills the decadence and brutal idealism of the era). He joins a radical commune and meets its leader, Sasha, "short, vivid and dark-eyed," a man with a brilliant mind and a broken body. Mundy belongs for the first time; he's found a soul mate. If Mundy's father represents the failings of British-style colonialism, Sasha's father is a vivid and monstrous example of the Marxist version.

	ERICA BERGER / MIAMI HERALD Spy novelist John le Carré's "Absolute Friends," already out in Britain and Australia, may create quite a stir in the U.S.

Mundy saves Sasha's life during a student demonstration, is beaten for his trouble and whisked by British diplomats out of the country. He eventually gets a new job as an engaging but ineffective bureaucrat, leading goodwill tours of British artists behind the Iron Curtain.

Longing only to remain a happily married member of the British middle class, his plan is derailed by a bunch of appealing but clueless British drama students, who have the very bad judgment to try smuggling a Polish actor from Poland through East Germany and into the West.

Sasha, now an agent of the East German secret police, intervenes and evens the score, saving Mundy from the Stasi. But the favor comes with a price, and Mundy is pulled into a double (or even triple) spy game in which both he and Sasha pretend to spy on England, when their real goal is to pull down the hated East German regime.

Once the Berlin Wall comes down, Sasha disappears, and the now-divorced Mundy is tossed on the bone pile where irrelevant spies come to rest. This particular heap lies in Germany, and it is events there, in Heidelberg, that constitute the third part of "Absolute Friends."

Sasha returns from the margins. He pulls Mundy into a scheme of founding an open university that will liberate Western thought from the corporate imperialists, funded by a mysterious character named Dimitri who appears to have limitless funds to spend on this project.

It is here that "Absolute Friends" stumbles. The ensuing maelstrom has a devilish internal logic, if you subscribe to le Carré's notion that prevailing powers in the United States will do anything to advance their ends. However, even politically sympathetic readers will have to wonder at Mundy's credulousness in accepting the largess of Dimitri, who has Bad Man written all over him. Mundy and Sasha are driven forward in service to the plot, which aims to show the horrifying lengths that can be gone to achieve certain ends.

So here's that question: Are these real, convincing people, or are they standard-bearers for the novelist's rage? Here's an answer of sorts; no and yes. Mundy, Zara and Mustafa are beautifully drawn, enough to feel for them the existential anguish that le Carré so effectively ignites in his readers. But Mundy's sequence of bad choices is just not credible.

Then again, there's that disquieting feeling about the way le Carré's novels often prefigure later political reality.

Le Carré's Cold War novels anticipated the crumbling base of communism and its eventual demise. The first inkling I had of the brutality of Russia's war with Chechnya came from reading "Our Game." I learned about the callous treatment of Third World companies by some giant pharmaceuticals in "The Constant Gardener."

If the Orwellian despair of "Absolute Friends" prefigures the eventual trajectory of America's reaction to 9-11 and the Iraq war, the world is in for a rough time, indeed.

Mary Ann Gwinn can be reached at mgwinn@seattletimes.com

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