Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 16, 1993 TAG: 9309040317
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
``That one, I would guess, is from Central America,'' he says in a clipped British accent, his eyes following a short, dark-haired man across the street. ``I like the thick forearms, his walk. It wouldn't surprise me to meet him on the streets of Panama.''
A kid on roller blades speeds by; the Man in the Blue Blazer turns his head. He observes his straight, skinny legs, the confident way the kid holds up his shoulders. ``He's Oriental, for sure, but not Japanese. I believe he's Chinese.''
The roller blader disappears into traffic and attention shifts to a pretty young waitress. She has emerged from the restaurant next door, bringing drinks to a well-dressed couple at an outdoor table.
``Irish, don't you think?'' he asks playfully. ``She could be an actress, maybe a student.''
The Man in the Blue Blazer is not a spy, although he once was one a long time ago. He is a writer, a very famous writer. But judging from the way people look at him, he might just as well be a banker on holiday, the publisher of a wine magazine or just a particularly nosy businessman.
That's an advantage authors have over actors, musicians and other celebrities: They can spy on the public without the public spying back.
Even when their books are about spies.
Even when the name on those books is John le Carre.
``Having been doing that stuff at the very earliest, formative stage of my life, and then ending it abruptly, it's as if the fuse went on burning,'' says the author, whose best sellers include ``The Russia House'' and ``The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.''
``So it's a kind of vicarious career which I extend in the books. `They're coming to get me; the car's coming down the drive.' They say, `Get in the back. You're one of us. We got a job for you.' There's ... also a sense of guilt that I walked out on it and made a lot of money and broke the mold and there are all these gray men toiling at their desks and I should have been one.''
This is supposed to be the time for the white-haired, 61-year-old author to join that long-suffering (fictional) member of the British secret service, George Smiley, and retire to the leather chair in his paneled library. The Cold War is over, communism has fallen and spy novelists seem as outdated as experts on the Warsaw Pact.
But any ideas of saying goodbye were rejected in le Carre's last novel, ``The Secret Pilgrim,'' which warned that although ``now we had defeated communism, we were going to have to set about defeating capitalism.'' And the author assured readers, ``There's no such thing as retirement, really. ... I'm a newcomer to the overt world, but I'm learning.''
``It's not hard to find tension around the world,'' le Carre, whose real name is David Cornwell, said at his hotel. ``I did some research and I think there were about 32 wars of one kind or another.
``The enchanting notion expressed at some point by [publisher] Tina Brown at the New Yorker that I had nothing to write about now that the Cold War is over is another part of that wishful thinking. Spies are more in demand now than they've ever been.''
Just to let you know he's starting anew in the so-called new world order, le Carre begins his latest novel, ``The Night Manager,'' at the beginning of the Gulf War and centers the story on a man half the author's age.
Jonathan Pine once worked undercover for the British in Northern Ireland, but now he's a night manager at the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich. His demeanor is mild, his body nimble. He wears a carnation and has a steady gaze. His hands are spotlessly clean.
But le Carre's heroes don't remain idle long. One of the guests at the hotel is Richard Onslow Roper, an international arms dealer and cohort of drug dealers and dictators. He is not only referred to as ``the worst man in the world,'' but his past is connected to Pine's. An associate of Roper's once had a mistress with whom Pine was in love. The mistress was murdered.
Vowing to ``treat himself to a little chaos,'' Pine accepts an offer from a splinter group of British intelligence to spy on Roper. A fake kidnapping of Roper's son is staged and Pine comes to the rescue. He soon becomes friends with Roper and meets some of his friends, veterans of ``every dirty war from Cuba to Salvador to Guatemala to Nicaragua.''
``Well, Roper is some kind of metaphor for the process of almost blind taking, which fires some parts of our materialist society. He's a metaphor for materialism replacing morality,'' le Carre said.
``He's a metaphor also for those unspoken doctrines which play an important part in decision-making at the highest levels of the Western world. Namely, `It does no harm to have an Iraq-Iran war. In fact, it's very useful. Turns over the arms industry. We hold the balance of power; let those bastards kill each other.' `AIDS in Africa? Not all bad - thins 'em all out.' `Famine? Part of the natural order of things.'
``You may think I'm being flippant, disgusting, but if you were to read the interior memos of the World Bank, you would really be coming upon arguments of this kind.''
Ask the author who inspired Pine and he will offer the knowing smile that says you're looking right at him. Pine, he says, was a creation of ``self-love, self-pity, self-caricature.''
Aside from both being spies, he notes similarities between their upbringings. Pine is an orphan; the author rarely saw his parents. Both had ``no real childhood'': Pine endured everything from orphanages to foster homes; le Carre was sent to boarding school at age 5.
Le Carre got out of the spy business some 30 years ago, but the stories he tells about his books sound like spy stories: dodging Israeli gunfire in the service of writing ``The Little Drummer Girl''; being confronted by Khmer Rouge soldiers while researching ``The Honourable Schoolboy''; speaking to Armani-suited arms dealers for ``The Night Manager.''
He has been relentless about the failings of the West, but le Carre still was bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Soviet bloc's downfall to make the world a safer place: The great, unspoken irony of ``The Night Manager'' is the similarity of its plot to his old books.
As in ``The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,'' someone is sent on a dangerous mission and discovers the people to whom he reports are as untrustworthy as the people he's spying on. The villains are no less evil and the ``good guys'' no less unfeeling; the greatest cause to root for is the individual to get the job done and to get out alive.
``There were other formulas I could have chosen, but I love, and I guess always, this business of taking a strange eye into the enemy camp, a watchful eye,'' he said.
``By Charlie [in `The Little Drummer Girl'] entering the Palestinian world, she's almost a private eye, really. It's a private eye with subtext, the agent dispatched. We know when Jonathan is making his mark with Roper and that curiously English male friendship is developing between them - buddy-buddy stuff - it's enjoyable for us because we know Jonathan is going to destroy him.
``It's like the Hitchcock answer to the journalist's question, `How long can you hold a kiss on the screen?' And he said, `About 20 minutes.' And the journalist said, `That's a hell of a long kiss.' And he said, `Yes, well, first of all, I've put a bomb under the bed ...' ''
by CNB