The sins of the father
Anita Brookner
A PERFECT SPY by John Le Carre
Hodder & Stoughton, f9.95
Aperfect spy is a spy without a cause, someone drawn to the trade by helpful advisers and a guiltily charming desire to accommodate as many people as possible. On another level, a perfect spy is the son of a crooked father, whose insouciance he inherits and whose plausibility he manages to devote to most of the temporary allies life puts in his path. He is the servant of no master because he can only discern the nearer connection; beyond his networks and the agents with whom he exchanges both information and disinformation lie deceivers so deceiving that he marries one and chooses another as godfather to his child without ever getting much of the drift of their part in his plot.
We are back in the bleak but inflated world of espionage, a delusional system so complete that very few of its practitioners are fully conversant with either the rules or the players. Magnus Pym, of Prague, Berlin, Stockholm, and Washington, goes on the run when he senses his time running out, and retires not to Moscow, not even to Prague, where his most ingenious stra- tagems have been laid, but to a small guest- house in Devon run by one of those spinsters who provide crazy temporary cover and for whose lack of charm John Le Carre nurses a wintry affection. In his sparsely furnished room, to which he has transported his late father's filing cabinet and a Standard Browning .38 automatic, Pym writes a letter to his son, explaining his progress through life. The letter is 463 pages long and constitutes a novel as enthralling and as uncomfortable as any- thing Le Cane has ever written.
The sins of Magnus Pym are to be laid at the door of his father, confidence trickster, philanthropist, black marketeer, and sometime Liberal candidate, a man of imperial splendour and uncertain locution, somewhere between Mr Micawber and Mr Turveydrop. There is indeed a Dickensian thrust to Pym senior, as there is to much of a novel in which characters have names like Jack Brotherhood and Makepeace Watermaster and Bo Brammell. The acti- vities of Pym senior are in fact overblown and never for a moment convincing, but so bizarre is his utterance that one takes him on board as a curiosity, just as one gradual- ly succumbs to the sinister embellishments of the plot, yielding to the heady oxygen of insecurity as Pym, our man in Prague and later Vienna, proceeds to ever more prob- lematic trade-offs with his ally and oppo- site number, Axel, formerly a native of Carlsbad, the city beloved of Beethoven and Brahms.
Axel is in some mysterious way Pym's only real friend, for Pym has only seriously betrayed Axel once, and his excuse might have been that he was very young at the time. Their connection languishes just at the time when the momentum that got them both to America expires for lack of nourishment. Where there is too much information both spies and spymasters feel a disdain that is almost aristocratic. This disdain is of course commingled with a very real seediness, as Pym's hopeless father pursues his son with ever more immediate demands. It is in fact the father's destiny that overshadows the son, and it is his father's death that shocks Pym into a temporary appreciation of reality, an appreciation that brings him to Miss Dub- ber's guest-house, out of season, with his Browning automatic for company.
As might be expected, there is a melan- choly complexity to the narrative of A Perfect Spy, and, at the outset, a slightly obstructive use of similes and adjectives which clouds rather than sharpens the attention. Le Cane is a long-winded writer but a scrupulous and deliberate one. The investment of his tremendous preparation pays off in the confident handling of his equally tremendous plot. This is not a novel to be read lightly, nor can it be, for it demands as much attention as a code-book and evokes in the reader a fascinated impatience with its shadowy world of self-referring disloyalties. The players of this particular game would seem to need a frightening mixture of belle indifference and sheer obstructive mischief; it is possible that in drafting them into fiction spymaster Le Cane has given them one elusive chance of unburdening and explaining themselves. The loneliness that is the fate of the double agent, particularly when he is not sure if his cover has been blown, and the final renun- ciation of all stratagems as the suicidal chance is embraced, are meticulously plot- ted, as Le Cane outwits even his hero. His engagement with Pym is an affair of the heart, but it is an affair that has turned sour: there is a dry fervour about the punishment he deals out for such a grand desire to please. It is in fact the dubious incubation of such a desire that forms the subject of his story. It is a considerable exercise. Other novels will seem very pallid for a while after this.
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