| | |  Entertainment | Books | October 2008 
Terrorists and Spies, Weaving Their Webs
 Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
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John le Carré’s latest novel, “A Most Wanted Man,” is set in Hamburg, Germany, the city where Mohamed Atta and other members of Al Qaeda prepared for their assault on the United States — a “guilty city,” in one character’s words, which hatched this terrorist cell, and which, in the years since the attacks, has become a focal point for German, American and British intelligence.
It is in post-9/11 Hamburg that operatives from those three intelligence agencies play out a high-stakes game of surveillance and detention in this novel, and it is here that one illegal immigrant and terrorist suspect, and several earnest, liberal do-gooders, are caught in their nets of manipulation and betrayal. Although the story is enlivened by Mr. le Carré’s intimate knowledge of tradecraft and his psychological insights into the reasons people become spies, informers and believers in a cause, the novel is flawed, like his 2004 book, “Absolute Friends,” by an overly schematic narrative devised to drive home the author’s contempt for the take-no-prisoners methods employed by the United States in the war on terror. As a result, the moral chiaroscuro and nuanced ambiguities that distinguished his cold war novels give way, in these pages, to a blunter, more predictable story line that lurches, at times, into sentimentality and contrivance.
As in many earlier le Carré novels, the central character of the story is a man struggling to come to terms with the legacy of his prodigal father. Issa, who turns up in the streets of Hamburg looking for refuge, says he’s from Chechnya, and though he’s “stateless, homeless, an ex-prisoner and illegal,” says he plans with Allah’s help to study medicine in the West. He will later claim that his father — a Russian colonel named Karpov, who he says raped his Chechen mother and abandoned her to her death — smuggled a large sum of money out of the country, and that he, Issa, has been told to contact one Tommy Brue, the sole surviving partner of a private banking house named Brue Frères, about those funds. He does not wish to touch a euro of that filthy money, he adds, but hopes that Brue can somehow help him obtain a German passport and residence permit.
Brue, it turns out, has father problems himself. It was his father who put the good name of Brue Frères at risk by recklessly setting himself up as a “banker of choice to a bunch of Russian gangsters.” The secret money-laundering accounts he set up for the Russians were ingeniously called Lipizzaners — after the famous Viennese performing horses who have the odd distinction of being born jet black and turning white with age — and, in fact, it is the Lipizzaner name that Issa invokes when he finally meets Brue.
Issa’s movements are being tracked by German authorities — some of whom assert that he is “an Islamist Russian criminal with a long record of convictions for militant actions,” a dangerous man who has escaped from prison and had himself smuggled into Germany. Meanwhile, several well-meaning Hamburg residents have set about trying to help Issa. Instead of seeing a dangerous militant, they see a traumatized young man, still reeling from the torture he was subjected to in prison — a sensitive youth, who aspires to become a doctor and who likes to listen to Tchaikovsky.
Leyla, a Turkish émigré, and her son, Melik, give Issa temporary refuge in their apartment, although they fear that their act of kindness — or gullibility — will compromise their chances for obtaining German citizenship. And a young lawyer named Annabel Richter, who works for an organization called Sanctuary North — “A Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany” — takes him on as a client and presses his case to Brue.
Predictably enough, a series of emotional entanglements complicates matters further. Brue finds himself drawn to Annabel, who vaguely reminds him of his estranged daughter and, seduced by her idealism, he becomes obsessed with the idea of expiating the sins of his father in the service of a humanitarian cause. At the same time, Annabel — whose work underscores her rebellion against her wealthy, Establishment family — finds herself drawn to Issa, who begins to fantasize about marrying her one day.
As for the German operatives monitoring Issa’s case, they soon find themselves clashing with other members of Berlin’s “espiocracy,” as well as British and American intelligence interests, as the case against this illegal immigrant grows increasingly complex. Was the identification of Issa as a member of a violent militant group obtained from a supposed Chechen jihadist through torture — and therefore possibly false? Is Abdullah, an eminent Islamic philosopher living in Hamburg and renowned for his charitable works, actually funneling money to terrorists, and will Issa, who wants to donate his father’s dirty money to those charities, become a tool of the intelligence agents who want to use him to entrap the religious leader?
Mr. le Carré orchestrates these developments smoothly but glibly — like a thriller screenwriter on automatic pilot. And while his portraits of Annabel, Brue and some of the German intelligence operatives are emotionally detailed, Issa and Abdullah remain flimsy stick figures — more symbols than human beings.
For that matter, Mr. le Carré’s contempt for the United States’ post-9/11 approach to the war on terror not only makes for a story told in blacks and whites — with none of the grays that distinguished his famous Smiley novels — but also results in an ending that the reader can see looming a mile off. |
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