![]() My own contacts in MI6 are meagre, but I am promised, with some vigour, by a veteran with “very British features” that no straight diplomat would have been deputed to officiate on such a mission – which must show how little your average old hand knows (or tells) about what really, really now goes on. Le Carré appends a grateful list of sources who have instructed him on today’s military-politico-plutocratic amalgam. But, of course, things do not rest there. Paul duly turns back into Christopher Probyn and is rewarded with a Caribbean ambassadorship and accidental knighthood (the Queen happened to be passing). ![]() Such is the mentality of these murderous shits”, Illiot tells the plainly honourable, pliantly dutiful “Paul” during his flashbacked briefing.Īfter the deployment of state-of-the-dark-arts equipment, and some unscheduled gunfire from aliens on the beach, Operation Wildlife is said to have gone perfectly according to plan only not a word to anyone, not even the missus. Punter’s trap has been baited with the prospect of buying “Manpad”, “just the item if you are contemplating bringing down an unarmed airliner. “Paul” seems long in the tooth for a Whitehall warrior summoned to scale Gibraltar’s precipitous flanks at night, but – a little like the gallant, puffed character played by David Niven in The Guns of Navarone – up he goes, in the company of an assortment of salts of the earth, the diminutive Jeb (who says “like” and “see” a lot, to establish how Welsh he is) and “Shorty”, the six-foot-six toughie, both of whom will appear in later episodes. In case we fail to register this witticism the first time around, we get a second chance later. According to Paul’s South African informant, Elliot, pronounced “Illiot”, Aladdin is “basically a mixed-race Pole I personally would not touch with a barge”. The mark has been lured into believing he is about to rendezvous with Aladdin (said, helpfully, to be named “as in the famous Arabian fairy tale”). That way, “we” can keep our hands clean, but lend one of them at the same time to some of “our” dodgy cousins. the chosen intimate of the worst dregs of international society”. ![]() “Paul”, as he is trying to get used to calling himself, is said to be in a state of “incarceration”, although he is free to go to the brasserie and is, we soon discover, merely waiting to be summoned to play his pseudonymous part in the pre-arranged, HMG-backed skulduggery which involves nabbing “Punter”, a terrorist supplies specialist, and having him ferried, by some high-powered mercenaries, to a ship anchored off Gibraltar, whence he will be taken to face the presumably excruciating fate merited by a mixed-race “unprincipled fucking merchant of death. That would indeed make for a fanciful dream. Despite his parading all these manifestly insular qualities, “it would not have occurred to many people, even in their most fanciful dreams, that he was a middle-ranking British civil servant, hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity”. Hustled into identifying with a decent chap in an unpleasant spot (with a bed “big enough for six”), the reader has little time to wonder what “very British features” look like and how they can be deemed “honourable” on sight while being simultaneously engorged with rage. ![]() His very British features, though pleasant and plainly honourable, indicated a choleric nature brought to the limits of his endurance”. His novels are those of a worldly, wise moralist whose opinions are implicit in devious plots in which good men are regularly done down or find themselves warped by force majeure.Ī Delicate Truth begins “On the second floor of a characterless hotel” in Gibraltar, where “a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom. That he writes under a pseudonym seems emblematic of a writer who has made himself shady the better to be at home in the dark places of the world of double-dealing. JOHN LE Carré is the grand master of the low down. Hatchet Job 2014 | Previous years | Manifesto | Pressįrederic Raphael on A Delicate Truth by John le Carré THE TLS
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