Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

Battersea,

‘Coffee, please.’ ‘Milk? Sugar? The milk’s soy, I should add.’ ‘Just black, thank you, Dom. No soy.’ Does he mean soya? Is soy the smart man’s version these days? He puts his head round the stippled-glass door, engages in stage banter with Viv, sits again.

Really?

‘What about President Donald Trump then?’ he demands, enunciating the name as if it were the very devil’s. ‘Do you or do you not regard Trump, which I do, as a threat and incitement to the entire civilized world, plus he is presiding over the systematic no-holds-barred Nazification of the United States?’

Bullshit

His father was also an old-style Communist who had burned his Party card in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I suspect Ed nursed him on his deathbed.

At the age of eighteen, he renounced his Christian faith in favour of what he called ‘all-inclusive humanism’ which I took to be Nonconformism without God, but out of tact I refrained from suggesting this to him.

And of men friends, the people he should be hanging out with in the gym, or sorting the world with, or jogging, cycling, pubbing? Ed never mentioned a single such person to me, and I question whether they existed in his life. Deep down, I suspect, he wore his isolation as a badge of honour.

It was thanks to her, so far as I could gather, that he had made some sort of study of the rise of German nationalism in the nineteen twenties, which seems to have been her subject. What is certain is that on the strength of such arbitrary studies he felt empowered to draw disturbing parallels between the rise of Europe’s dictators and the rise of Donald Trump. Get him on this subject, and you got Ed at his most overbearing.

I never asked him, but I think it was Germany’s atonement for its past sins that spoke most forcefully to his secularized Methodist soul: the thought that a great nation that had run amok should repent its crimes to the world. What other country had ever done such a thing? he demanded to know. Had Turkey apologized for slaughtering the Armenians and Kurds? Had America apologized to the Vietnamese people? Had the Brits atoned for colonizing three-quarters of the globe and enslaving numberless of its citizens?

After washing up, we go to bed early because we need to make love and I have a crack-of-dawn flight.

Love this book.

He is dispatched on foreign missions, lends a hand in ‘extra-legal measures’, euphemism for assassination. Before he becomes too sullied he is recalled to Moscow to be instructed in the gentler arts of fake diplomacy.

extra legal measures

That is what they hired you for. As a Romeo. For your universal homoerotic charm. You were insistent, I was young. Voilà.’

Mark!