TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

The Line Between A Patriot And A Thug

ADVERTISEMENT

By KEVIN WALKER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2008

"A Most Wanted Man," by John Le Carre (Scribner, $28)

This is not one of Le Carre's best efforts. And while it might be a cliche to say that even a lesser Le Carre effort is a better read than the best offered by others, well, I'm saying it, anyway. Because it's true.

Le Carre is a rare talent among spy thriller writers, one who goes beyond the trappings of the genre and explores non-plot-driven concepts such as love, deception (especially the deception of one's self), attraction, the corroding influence of money and complex moral situations. Charles McCarry is also good at this sort of thing.

Le Carre became popular with his third book, "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," and his best efforts have tackled topical issues, such as the AIDs epidemic in Africa in "The Constant Gardener."

Here, he's into issues that top the concerns of many Americans: radical Islam, torture, spies on the front line of the war on terror. As usual, he manages to provide not only what feels like the behind-the-scenes goods on the intelligence community but also his usual lyrical writing and glimpses into the vagaries of the human heart.

But the constant thread that runs throughout the book is a simple question: How far should rational, intelligent people go in defense of country? Or, to look at it another way, where's the line between a "good patriot" and a thug?

In one of the book's more pointed jabs, young German attorney Anabel Lichter warns, "In my law school we talked a great deal about law over life. It's a verity of our German history: law not to protect life, but to abuse it. We did it to the Jews. In its current American form it licenses torture and state kidnapping. And it's infectious."

It is to Le Carre's credit that the question cuts both ways in the political debate. In fact, the British author's book is refreshingly not American-centric, although Americans play a key role that will surely leave readers in the United States feeling uneasy about this country's capacity as the "world's police force."

This one starts with the appearance of Issa Karpov on the streets of Hamburg, Germany, following Turkish immigrant Melik Oktay to the home he shares with his mother. He then knocks on the door and pleads to be allowed to stay while recovering from injuries he sustained during torture in a Turkish prison. A Muslim, he claims to have come to Hamburg to become a medical student. But Oktay and his mother soon learn that he is a terrorist suspect, the son of notorious Russian Grigori Karpov, the deceased communist-era army general who is suspected of slaughtering thousands of innocents.

Karpov retains attorney Lichter, who is sent on a strange assignment: contact Tommy Brue, chief executive of a small Hamburg bank, about money that Gen. Karpov left in a secret account as the communist empire collapsed in the late 1980s.

The novel centers on those three - Karpov, Lichter and Brue - as they battle inner demons and face ethical choices.

Le Carre leaves Karpov slightly hazy. One is never sure exactly of his background, his affiliation with terrorists or his exact intentions. But his emotional vulnerability and the scars left by his captors, who tortured him, make him an attractive figure for Lichter.

Lichter is a young German suffering under the guilt of her country's Nazi past (This is one of the best non-German books I've read that addresses this uniquely German, and very powerful, issue). Whether she admits it to herself or not, she has a desperate need to not only fight for justice but also to find someone to nurture. Karpov fills both bills rather neatly.

Brue is at once the most cliched and most complex character. A British man of the old school of manners and elegance, he also is in a failing marriage and dealing with an estranged daughter who has fled to America. The arrival of Karpov further complicates his life. For one, it forces him to deal with the shady dealings of his father, who set up the Karpov account. For another, he immediately falls in love with Lichter.

And we haven't even gotten to the spy part. All three slowly become tangled in the multiple intelligence operations whirling around Karpov. At the center is German agent Gunther Bachmann, who carries much of the book's more pointed segments about the war on terror.

For instance, the choleric Bachmann launches into a tirade about the failures of Western intelligence before and after Sept. 11. He blames, first, the West's "tolerance of religious and racial diversity," which he says is "practically an invitation to come and test us out."

But he saves his sharpest barbs for the quality of intelligence, arguing that Western agents "thought we could charm them across the line to us. We thought we could buy them. We waited for all those high-level defectors to meet us in car parks at dead of night. Nobody showed up. We trawled the airwaves to break their codes. They haven't got any codes. Why not? Because we weren't fighting the Cold War anymore. We were fighting off-cuts of a nation called Islam with a population of one and half billion and a passive infrastructure to match."

Bachmann, working with the British and the Americans, eventually hatches an operation that also involves Brue and Lichter, throwing both into the complex world of intelligence and also into inner turmoil over the choices they are making about Karpov.

All this leads to an ending that is as abrupt as it is devastating.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT