While a devout fan
of British spy novels in general and John le Carré in
particular, I think he really overdid it in his
latest novel, Absolute Friends. It is confusing,
inept and cut short halfway through the events when
things just begin to get interesting. (It beats around
the bush even more than The Tailor of Panama).
Nonetheless, it is disturbingly well-researched and thus
deserves to be treated seriously. Le Carre is a former
British intelligence officer who has had access to
material and insights into international politics that
are not be trifled with.
Moreover, he represents what could be called the British
establishment’s ever latent anti-Americanism, people who
never believed in the ‘special relationship’ and know
full well how the British empire was dismantled by the
US.
Although technically a dying breed - his generation is
passing away – le Carre is even more representative of a
growing constituency in the UK, the younger
anti-Americans who have emerged since Bush became
president, even before 9/11.
For the
required role of anti-hero we behold Edward Mundy, an
out of work British intelligence agent residing –
predictably for le Carré – in Germany. Mundy is a former
everything, from a former double agent for East German
intelligence to a failed writer and musician to a
bankrupt English teacher to a former flunky of the
British Council who unsuccessfully tried to promote his
country’s culture abroad.
Not to mention, a failed husband and father. (He spent
so much time behind the iron curtain that his English
wife got a divorce, making it easier for her to pursue
her political career in Blair’s Labour Party, while his
son only communicates via e-mail).
Above
all, Mundy is a former student rebel, having cut his
anti-imperialist teeth in Berlin of the 1960s, where he
met his absolute friend, the mysterious leader of
Berlin’s (passivist) anti-Vietnam protestors, Sasha.
Mundy was dragged into the spy trade, sans
kicking and screaming, by Sasha in the 1980s. Sasha lost
hope in the European left at the close of the 1960s and
joined the Stasi, only to switch sides again after
finding that Communists are hypocrites too. He bumps
into Mundy on one of the latter’s cultural escapades
behind the iron curtain and their friendship resumes, in
a new professional dimension. Both then are forced to
close shop with the abrupt end of the Cold War. Sasha
makes a run for it, disappearing before the Stasi HQ is
torn down by angry protestors and spends the rest of his
time traveling through Third World capitals warning
everyone about the advent of the unipolar American
colossus.
Mundy
now ekes out an existence as a tour guide, living with a
Turkish, Muslim girl (Zara), and her legitimate son
(Mustafa) from an abusive criminal husband. Mundy does
this under the advice of the local ‘enlightened’ imam
(no comment). Zara had originally ‘offered’ herself to
him to scrape together enough to feed herself and her
son. And to stay out of the reach of her incarcerated
ex-husband’s Turkish gang. Mundy’s substitute family
genuinely love, adore and admire him as he nurses them
back to psychological health, a task made all the harder
as his frail career goes into the pits. (His school
intended to teach the German business executive class
the language of globalization, English, but to no
avail). Suddenly. Sasha reenters his drab, missionless
life with an offer he knows Mundy can’t refuse.
The ‘art’ of mismanaging empires
Mundy is
very tall whereas Sasha is partly crippled from birth.
This is a famous device in literature, the notion of the
‘crippled giant’, more specifically in le Carré’s case,
Britain and/or Germany after WWII. Mundy is the British
giant, with much to give to the world but no ability to
do so while under the gaze of the two superpowers.
He embodies the quintessential Britain that has lost its
empire and is searching for a role, usually substituting
the glories of its past with its so-called special
relationship with the US. Poor Sasha hails from the hub
of a European civilization that has been rent by the
Cold War.
When Sasha meets Mundy he condemns him for working as a
tour guide in the palace of some former Bavarian king,
describing the regent – in trademark Sasha fashion – as
a
‘fascist’. I believe this is meant to be a condemnation
of the current Germany as semi-fascistic in its stance
towards Muslims, American imperialism and the violation
of civil liberties in the war on terror. Once again le Carré is angry with the German giant, his adopted second
country, for not living up to the better side of its
past and le Carré’s highest expectations.
Mundy,
moreover, is the illegitimate son of empire, scarred by
his past. His long deceased (in childbirth) mother was
Irish. Mundy’s father insists on telling him his mother
was a British aristocrat. Mundy spent his childhood in
India in the last days of the Raj in what would become
Pakistan after the partition. His affection for the
East, particularly the Islamic quadrant, is shown in his
relationship with surrogate mother Aya – his Pakistani
nanny – whose whole family was massacred by Hindus
during the partition. Mundy’s father, although a British
army officer, instilled a healthy hatred of British
imperialism in his son, pointing out how the Brits
washing their hands of their colonial responsibility led
to the massacres.
Mundy is
now making amends with the Turkish Zara and her son
Mustafa, a relationship meant to exemplify the kind of
relations that should but rarely do exist between Islam
and the West. (He also had a Muslim sweetheart as a
child). His inability to transform his feelings into
literature and music reflects Britain’s inability to
feel and voice the pains of the downtrodden of the
world.
Opposing blasts from the past
When
Sasha (Russian for Alexander) makes his derring-do
comeback he hitches up with an eccentric pacifist
billionaire named Dimitri. In James Bond-fashion Mundy
is introduced to this highly unlikely figure – one of
the weaker points of the narrative – at his plush
mansion (later vacated and trashed). Dimirti wants
Mundy’s help to build a ‘Counter-University’ – an
educational system that fights conformity and American
imperialism. Mundy gladly signs up, only to be pulled
aside later by an old associate, CIA man Rourke, who
tells him that Dimitri is really an anarchist terrorist
that they have been tracking forever. Dimitri has in mind
creating a united terror front against the US, pooling
the resources of both the European anarchists left over
from the Cold War and the new Islamic fundamentalists.
Or so says Rourke.
The
perplexed Mundy contacts his old superior who reveals
that it’s all a ruse. Dimitri was indeed a terrorist but
is now working with the Americans! Mundy quickly gets
his ‘wife’ and her son out of harm’s way and tries to
contact Sasha to warn him and help him escape. But
Rourke has both Mundy and Sasha gunned down, snuffing
the planned anti-university in the process. It’s hailed
as a great success of the war on terror, the elimination
of a couple of European terrorists trying to team up
with Islamic fundamentalists. (The funds Dimitri
provides for Mundy’s new university come from a Saudi
bank account).
Mundy’s
lady is interrogated by Turkish police because the
Americans want someone else taking the blame for
torture. (When Mundy himself is nabbed by Rourke’s men,
who are Austrian security, he is interrogated as a
suspected ‘terrorist’ and strip-searched by having a
couple of fingers shoved where they shouldn’t go). The
enlightened imam who sanctioned their common-law
marriage gets detained indefinitely. It turns out that
Rourke doesn’t work for the CIA anymore but for a
private intelligence group funded by the US oil industry
and run by neo-conservatives and Christian
fundamentalists. In the meantime, the American war
machine grinds on towards another confrontation, this
time with Iran. End of story.
Give the giant his due
At the
artistic level what we have here is a contrast between
two duos, Mundy and Sasha, on the one hand, and Rourke
and Dimitri, on the other. Rourke, like Mundy, is half
Irish, but unlike Mundy only pretends to be a liberal
anti-Vietnam War protester. Rourke refuses to learn the
lessons of that conflict. He put his Bostonian, East
Coast liberal past behind him to find gainful employment
with savage West Coast moneyed interests and ideologues.
Sasha and Mundy stand for Old Europe; Dimitri for New
Europe, despite his age (his accent has an American
twang). He represents a Europe that has decided to go
along to get along, and specifically the violent
leftist, anarchists that Sasha opposed all along.
A
girlfriend of both Sasha and Mundy from their rebel
days, Judith, becomes a lawyer who puts up with her
two-timing husband for his money. More broadly the novel
represents a reprisal of themes and issues in
international politics and East-West affairs explored in
Our Game (1995), namely, the “demonization of
Islam as a substitute for the anti-Communist crusade.”
And Our Game, while a superior work, suffers from
symbolic overload. Admittedly, I belittled Absolute
Friends allegories because I didn’t know just how
pertinent and well documented they are. I found out, the
hard way, when I chanced upon
“Postmodern Jihad”, a rather
offensive little article by Waller R. Newell.
Newell indulges in the same
self-serving accusations and flights of fancy as Rourke.
For instance, he charges that:
… European Marxists
have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed
close to achieving the longed-for revolution against
American hegemony… Derrida… reacted to the collapse
of the Soviet Union by calling for a “new
international.”… a grab bag of… students, feminists,
environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to
combat American-led globalization. Islamic
fundamentalists were obvious candidates for
inclusion… Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri… identify
Islamist terrorism as a spearhead of “the postmodern
revolution” against “the new imperial order.”… “its
refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American
hegemony.”
It’s hard to believe that
Islamic fundamentalists would ‘obviously’ rub shoulders
with homosexuals and atheists but, then again, not for
someone like Newell who understands everything in
neo-conservative terms. Why he even relies for gospel
truths on Claire Sterling’s fanciful and vintage The
Terror Network. He duly trots out the charge that it
was the post-modernism of Michel Foucault and the
existentialism of Sartre and (fascism of) Heidegger that
engendered Islamic fundamentalism. Similar absurd
charges can be found in Victor Davis Hanson, “The
Wages of Appeasement: How Jimmy Carter and academic
multiculturalists helped bring us Sept. 11”,
and in Jamie Glazov’s “The Last Shah of Iran”.
What we should take to heart is
le Carré’s condemnation of a wishy-washy Europe
unwilling to stand up to the US. The whole point of
Rourke’s intelligence operation was to embarrass
anti-Iraq War Germany. As for the novel’s notion of a
Counter-University, I suspect this is a satirical spin
on the American “war on terror” emphasis on post-modern
education as the breeding ground for the next generation
of terrorists. It’s no coincidence that Newell says that
‘liberal’ education in America has been ‘damaged’ by
“postmodernism… a parlor game in which we ‘deconstruct’
great works of the past and impose our own meaning on
them without regard for the authors’ intentions or the
truth or falsity of our interpretations.” If people
instead were educated to reject American imperialism in
effective non-violent ways then there would be no need
to resort to violence, le Carré seems to be saying. I
couldn’t agree more.
So, as
always le Carré has his literary finger on the pulse of
post-Cold War intellectual developments. We really
should take heed of his advice. The Counter-University
is a must if we want to do something about the causes of
terrorism and the neo-conservative ideology that
stokes the flames of terrorism, whether leftist or
Islamic. We all need some reeducating and le Carré is
the one to point the way, even if he could have done it
in a slightly better fashion than this near absolute
tragedy of a novel!
See
Paul Kennedy, “Has the US Lost its Way?”,
Observer, 3 March 2002, Sunder Katwala, “Is
America Too Powerful for its Own Good?”,
Observer, 10 February 2002 and Fred Halliday,
“Aftershocks that will Eventually Shake Us All”,
Observer, 25 November 2001. Even the kind
of stodgy, British conservative anti-Americanism
of yonder is on the rise again, as attested to
by the comments made about President Bush by a
former cabinet minister from the British
Conservative Party: “terrifying… ignorant… a
prisoner of the religious right who believes God
tells him what to do… like a child running
around with a grenade with the pin pulled out.”
See J.F.O. McAllister,
“Mad at America”, Time Europe, 161(3), 20
January 2003, p. 16.
Emad El-Din Aysha
teaches at the American University in Cairo and is a
film reviewer and political columnist for the
Egyptian Gazette and Egyptian Mail.