Agent Running in the Field

[Grant, Usurper of Book Club]

Sadly, the last book ever written by Jean le Carré. Written nearly 60 years after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Although, A Legacy of Spies, is an actual sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Agent running in the Field provides us the best contrast with the moral distance we’ve covered over this time, but with more of a sense of detachment.

Spy novels at their best contain intrigue and suspense, but they also tend to have a moral aspect to them. They are a way to hold a mirror up to society and its system of values. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold forcefully makes the point that the motives and actions of the agencies and by extension their agents are incompatible with the views that they have been tasked to defend.

Le Carré started his books about spying wrestling with ideas of good versus evil and showing that the good guys do not always prevail. But it was in the context of the cold war, maybe both sides were doing bad things, but at least one side tolerates free speech, and allows such books, indeed such criticisms to be published. The other side does not allow this type of dissenting view and in an existential struggle, there is no time for niceties.

What to make then Agent Running in the Field? Nat, the protagonist is no George Smiley, instead he’s an over the hill field agent who has been brought home and can’t even defend the value of his espionage career when she challenges him on it. After all, if Nat is working to defend the values of his society, what does it mean if even he no longer believes in them.

The existential struggle between East and West is over, and it’s been replaced by malaise as personified by Ed who is furious with the direction his country, and the United States are taking the western world. Now, rather than defending the citizens against what he perceives as threats, the intelligence communities are doing the same things that they’ve always done, but the rationale behind them is not as clear, operating, unelected, unaccounted for, and in the shadows.

Not having a say in how the world is going, feeling that his own country is moving inevitably and decisively away from the world he believes in is what causes Nat to act, and what sets the actions of the book off. But they are all oldLe Carré tropes, time spent in Germany, the Russians once again are the nominal villans. At the end though, it’s possible to read this as Le Carré felt a bit like Nat (still operational, but over the hill) and bit like Ed (angry at the world), not so covert for an old spymaster.