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House of Cards
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16761 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1989 |
1,996 Words |
| Author
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Herbert E. Meyer
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THE RUSSIA HOUSE
John le Carre
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
353 pp., $19.95
Every so often a world-famous novelist and his publisher produce a book that is so screwed up--so wrongheaded, so disconnected from reality, so poorly executed--that you wonder why on earth no one involved in the project sounded an alarm and stopped the presses long enough to either fix the bloody thing or kill it. Usually the answer is this: What has been produced isn't a novel at all, but rather a political tract in the form of a novel; since those involved agree with the tract's thesis and want to help spread it, they aren't operating on traditional standards of quality.
Such a novel-shaped tract is The Russia House, the new spy thriller by John le Carre.
The thesis of The Russia House is that the Cold War is really over, but it is being kept alive by--you guessed it--the CIA and its British counterpart MI6.
The plot that le Carre has concocted to develop his thesis is this: a Soviet scientist smuggles word to the West that the Soviet Union's high-technology weapons really don't work. But the West's intelligence services don't want to hear this because--naturally--if Soviet weapons don't work, the Soviet Union isn't really a threat; hence the intelligence services will be out of business. So the CIA and "The Russia House"--which in le Carre's jargon is the operations directorate of British intelligence--contrive with their allies in "the military-industrial complex" to kill the messenger.
If le Carre were just another struggling author, it would be all right to ignore his novel's underlying political thesis and to focus on its literary merits, or lack thereof. But John le Carre is a world-famous author who commands an enormous audience. The first printing of The Russia House runs to 350,000 copies in the United States alone. And his reputation for understanding the intelligence business and Cold War politics is such that his views are taken seriously by a lot of influential people; le Carre was chosen as the subject of a Newsweek cover story in May, and on June 1, ABC Evening News named him its "Person-of-the-Week."
In short, le Carre's voice carries, so what he thinks and writes matters. Indeed, in all his interviews le Carre is refreshingly honest in making clear that he intends and expects The Russia House to be taken seriously as a political work; that he is merely using the format of a spy novel to convey his political views.
OK, let's take le Carre seriously, and before discussing The Russia House as a spy novel, let's consider the political thesis that he wishes his readers to accept:
The Cold War is really over. As the novel's narrator--one Harry de Palfrey, the tired and burned-out legal adviser to British intelligence--puts it, "The old isms were dead, the contest between communism and capitalism had ended in a wet whimper." Tell that to the families of those hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Chinese students and workers who were shot or bayoneted to death in Tiananmen Square. Or to the
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