A young man with a “look of winter on a lovely spring day” steals into Hamburg. He’s starving, in pain, and desperate. He knows no one, has nowhere to stay and doesn’t speak the language. But he is instantly recognisable as a Muslim for his skullcap, the black-and-white kafiyeh round his neck and gold bracelet with tiny replica of the Koran in gold.
This, of course, immediately brings him to the notice of the police and the intelligence force in this German city, forces trying to make up for their perceived laxity in letting Mohammed Atta and his band of fundamentalist desperadoes breed and hatch 9/11 right under their noses in Hamburg mosques.
This is the impossible hero of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man — name, Issa Karpov; born in Grozny, Chechnya, illegal migrant and wanted by the police of two countries, Russia for being a Muslim militant, and Sweden for escaping custody.
In other words, he’s a man who epitomises everything that the West (and India for that matter) engaged in the “war on terror”, has been conditioned to condemn as guilty — guilty without hearing, and at times, guilty despite evidence to the contrary. Issa here is something of the Muslim Everyman: he’s poor, he’s naïve, he’s viscerally pious, he comes from one of the hotspots of violence in the world where Muslims are pitted against the West, and he’s completely ill-equipped to negotiate the webs of intelligence and counter-intelligence that are woven around him.
He’s also, in a very real sense, the victim, even though hero and victim are impossibly tangled categories in le Carré’s morally ambiguous scheme of things. This is true as much for Issa and as for Tommy Brue of private banking house Brue Freres plc, who willy-nilly falls into the role of Issa’s benefactor, led by his hormones or by his desire to make amends for the sins of his father.
Much less is the hero-victim-villain classification clear for Günther Bachmann, the head of the quaintly-named Foreign Acquisitions Unit of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution — “in plain language, domestic intelligence service”, the author parenthises — who seals his fate when he spots him at Hamburg railway station, but who ironically, is the only one in the end to believe in his essential innocence, and becomes his unlikely, and as it turns out in the end, ineffectual, saviour.
Le Carré’s many followers will find in Bachmann echoes of George Smiley, the man whose quiet wisdom, sense of history and ability to see through the wheels within wheels, cuts through the convolutions of the “Circus” in many of his famous Cold War novels like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy.
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Bachmann also has bits of Bill Haydon, the charismatic agent-runner, the man of action, whose intellectual vanities finally got the better of his nationalism; as he does of the tragic fall guys like Jim Prideaux and Magnus Pym (A Perfect Spy).
Compared to his Cold War novels, of course, there is in A Most Wanted Man much less ambiguity — le Carré’s sympathies, or rather his lack of sympathies with the American way of combating terrorism, of calling a man a Muslim terrorist and hanging him by it — are plain for all to read. This was after all the man who notoriously wrote in a Times essay in 2003:
“America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember; worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything that Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dream.”
But if the Amercians are the pure villains of the piece here, no one comes else comes out any cleaner — the British who toe the American line, the Germans caught in their own machinations and the Russians, who exploit the American obsession with terrorism to extract millions that are then stashed away in private accounts abroad.
It’s a bleak world view — and one in which even private good stands no chance. Melik and his mother Leyla, who shelter Issa in their home, pay a heavy price in being barred from re-entering Germany. Even the beautiful and well-connected Annabel Richter, the lawyer who seems to fall in love with Issa and is ready to sacrifice her all to save him (the novel’s weakest link), fails. No one can save Issa.
A Most Wanted Man
Author: John le Carré
Publisher: Hodder
price: Rs 275
Pages: 340