Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré​ – review

Ian McEwan has just published a novella about Brexit, The Cockroach , that is so bad-tempered and contemptuous of those he doesn’t agree with that it’s a betrayal of his talent. In Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré , who celebrates his 88th birthday this weekend, has integrated the subject and his anger about it into fiction much more thoroughly and seductively. 

It’s another of his novels of voice, entirely narrated, as though he is talking to us, by a veteran spy, Nat. Nat, 47, has been a serving member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service for 25 years, “in Moscow, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Tbilisi, Trieste, Helsinki and most recently Tallinn, recruiting and running agents of every stripe”. His dedication to his career has made him a “de facto absentee husband and father”, to his wife, human rights lawyer Prue, and disaffected 19-year-old daughter Steff, and now he’s back in London he needs to make things right with them. Nat suspects he may be about to be made redundant but, instead, he is asked to oversee “The Haven”, a rundown sub-station of the “Office” based in Camden, looking after low-grade defectors and informants.

A keen badminton player, Nat is the champion and honorary secretary of a club in Battersea, near his home. One evening he’s challenged to a match by a new member, Ed, 25 or so, tall, gawky, bespectacled, Northern and state-educated. Soon, Nat and Ed are playing regularly and having a matey drink at the bar afterwards, while Ed lets rip his youthful rage over Brexit and Donald Trump. 

Nat may privately agree about “the sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit” but he keeps his counsel, as Ed voices his indignation, calling Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Trump “an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none”, and rating Brexit as “the most important decision facing Britain since 1939”. Trump’s meeting with Putin he compares to that of Molotov and Ribbentrop.    

Nat is captivated by Ed, the son he never had. He recognises he is “in the presence of something rare in the life I had so far led, and particularly in such a young man: namely true conviction, driven not by motives of gain or envy or revenge or self-aggrandisement, but the real thing, take it or leave it”. Ed’s a good European too, inspired above all by the example of Germany, a culture loved also by Nat (and le Carré). 

So when it is revealed, via  one of The Haven’s recruits, that this paragon may be intending to betray his country, Nat is shocked — and determined to discover what’s really going on, seeking out contacts from his past, in scenes that give lots of scope to le Carré’s undiminished enjoyment of vivid characterisation and gamey, heavily accented dialogue. 

One of those he looks up is Arkady, formerly a double agent, now a gangster-oligarch. Arkady denounces Trump and Brexit even more abusively than Ed. “You know what Trump is?” “Tell me.” “He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO … And you Brits, what do you do? You suck his dick and invite him to tea with your Queen.” And so forth. Thus has le Carré adroitly handed over what he might like to say himself to entertainingly dodgy characters he has imagined.  

And he has, once more, set a story in motion here about what a man of integrity, who finds himself serving a government he no longer believes in, might or perhaps must do. This time the threat that demands to be met with action is “an Anglo-American covert operation already in the planning stage with the dual aim of undermining the social democratic institutions of the European Union and dismantling our international trading tariffs”. Even more evil than overt Brexit, then.

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. True, the language, though charming and fluent, feels like a burnished antique, never that of man in his forties now, belonging rather to an earlier era. 

As always, there’s considerable genre-suitable sentimentality, about the young, about women, especially. But then le Carré has developed into an immensely stylised writer, the creator of his own fictional world. At this point in his career, we can only be grateful for another chance to join him there. 

Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré​ (Viking, £20), buy it here.