And, dear reader, if you will allow me to [more…]. Our 88-year-old author is down with the youth. Meanwhile, at chez Nat, Mrs Nat, Prue, is a partner in an “old-established” London solicitors, yawn, fighting big Pharma, mega yawn. In an earlier novel, Ed might have been an agent whose integrity gets him killed; in the real world of 2019, he’d most likely be a full-fledged member of Resistance Twitter. An agent’s best transport option for a clandestine mission is a rented “clapped-out Vauxhall.” There’s a bureaucratic ban on bottled water. His readers will know from his first line that they are in the presence of a great enchanter. Copyright © 2020 | MH Magazine WordPress Theme by MH Themes, I put my bad arm around Marmon’s throat. At the same time, although le Carré locates much of his plot in a unified Germany, some things don’t change. She is called Gita. Agent Running in the Field is as ingeniously structured as any of le Carré’s fiction, skilfully misdirecting the reader for much of the time. Agent Running is right on the money, in psychology as much as politics, a demonstration of the British spy thriller at its unputdownable best. ‘Agent Running in the Field’ hits the scales at 288 pages. Having said that, there is a thin line between absorbing the reader into another world and simply over describing places and events. His interactions with Florence contain no obvious innuendo or inappropriate overtures. Seven of Nine is fiction and Bathhouse. “He is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] officers are pretty angry with him,” Dearlove declared during an event at the Cliveden Literary Festival. To paraphrase and misquote Ernest Bevin about the A-bomb,”We’ve got to have it by Christmas and we’ve got to have bloody ‘John le Carré’ along the spine.”. It’s another of his novels of voice, entirely narrated, as though he is talking to us, by a veteran spy, Nat. Even more evil than overt Brexit, then. With Trump in the Whitehouse and Britain having left the EU, we can laugh at the overindulged adolescent in the author, rather than let it spoil our reading. Not many writers half his age could so successfully put Goethe and Sting into the same sentence. The central idea doesn’t develop at all, we’re simply informed of it. Nat is reluctant, given the Haven’s state of disrepair, but he accepts. Not only is Nat displeased with the rung to which he's been demoted at work, not only does he loathe the class hijinks represented by the various higher-ups he must entreat as part of the assignment he is finally given, but he has a beloved wife, Prudence, who's a powerful human rights attorney working on taking down Big Pharma. Agent Running in the Field, John Le Carré, Viking, 288 pp., $29, Oct. 22, 2019 . 2017’s ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’, 320 (although 8 of its 38 chapters had been previously published elsewhere). What’s most remarkable is the way in which le Carré can still produce set-pieces of a type that he more or less invented 50 years ago and, at the age of 87, do them better than his scores of imitators. Agent Running in the Field is le Carré's 25th novel Credit: Rex/Viking A s the novel progresses, Ed’s fervent views lead him to take a course of action that lands both him and Nat in … A serious shortcoming of the book is that there isn’t enough of it. In these pages, Brexit is an “act of self-immolation” in which “the British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich, elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people”. If you wish to make a contribution small and often would be preferable. Kremlin-backed oligarchs own swaths of prime London real estate, donating heavily to sympathetic politicians while taking full advantage of what Nat describes as “the City of London’s ever-rotating laundromat” for dirty cash. The matter must be allowed to lie. Paypal accepts all sorts of payment methods. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré (Viking, £20), buy it here. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. Has, in the author’s mind, Communism been replaced by the populism of Brexit and Trump? How? The Goodnight Vienna Audio file Nicely written, it is clever in parts but one or two things jump conveniently ex Machina and the beginning of the novel is never explained beyond remarkable co-incidence. It may seem a small thing but it is vitally important. Agent Running in the Field, his 26th, opens cheekily with a badminton challenge: Nat, close to retirement and even closer to redundancy due to his inability to accept authority, is obsessed with this racquet sport. Are you sure you want to submit this vote? One of those he looks up is Arkady, formerly a double agent, now a gangster-oligarch. His second language, and third (Madame Galina taught him to "speak Russian with a French intonation, French with a Russian intonation, and such German as I have with a mixture of both.". Where McEwan refracted his outrage through the prism of Kafka, here’s le Carré, feverish with “the German bug”, doubling down on his renowned and suspenseful opacity with an urgent first-person narrative that ranges from a Battersea health club to a hunting lodge in Karlovy Vary.