by Adam Sisman
The plot has been constructed to illustrate this message, and it not only feels hastily jerry-built but ridiculously contrived as well. Whereas Mr. le Carré’s Smiley novels were famous for their nuanced depiction of the ambiguities of the cold war and their demythologizing of the grubby world of spying, this latest novel suffers from large heapings of sentimentality and naïveté.
It is simplistic where his earlier novels were sophisticated; dogmatic where those books were skeptical. Paradoxically enough, it also purveys the same sort of black and white moralism that Mr. le Carré’s nemesis, the Bush administration, is so fond of, and it does so not by persuasively dramatizing the author’s convictions but by bashing the reader over the head with dubious assertions and even more dubious scenarios.30
It was hard to imagine that the novel could thrive after such a battering in the most important arena in America. On publication the book entered the New York Times bestseller list at no. 3, but within a month it had slipped out of the list.
David tried to remain impervious to the criticism. He demurred when Anthony Barnett urged some sort of response to the ‘anguished’ English critics. ‘There’s no sillier fellow than a writer complaining about his reviews, & I can’t be another,’ he replied.31 But references to his age, and suggestions that he was out of touch, were infuriating, especially at a time when he felt that he was engaging with the modern world more directly than at any previous point in his career. ‘We are in Tregiffian at last, a bit bruised but recovering,’ he wrote to Vivian Green a couple of months after publication. ‘I think we both got a bit weary of the clamour about the book, the bouquets as well as the brickbats. (So of course the only thing to do is to start another one.)’32
While writing a novel David immerses himself in the story and shuts himself off from the world, trying to avoid commitments and refusing all but the most urgent social engagements. As he began to get going with the new book David again felt the need to apologise for declining another invitation from John Margetson. ‘I know it irritates you that I’m always working,’ he wrote: ‘I do want to write myself into the grave, as most writers do, and as most musicians want to play themselves into the grave and painters paint themselves etc …’33
The origins of David’s next book are obscure: he can no longer recall them himself. Probably the character came first. This time his secret sharer would be an interpreter: Bruno Salvador, known to all as Salvo. As a young diplomat with fluent German, David had acted as an interpreter for German politicians visiting Britain, and for British politicians visiting Germany. The role fascinated him, not least because interpreters have to bridge the gulf that exists between all cultures, even very sophisticated ones.
Salvo is a ‘zebra’, the half-caste natural son of an Irish Catholic missionary and a Congolese village woman whom he never knew. He spends his boyhood living on a mission in eastern Congo, where he cultivates his aptitude for languages in the servants’ hostel, curled up unnoticed on a wooden pallet as he listens to the talk of hunters, witch-doctors, spell-sellers, warriors and elders. Orphaned at ten years old, Salvo discovers to his surprise that he is British, a foundling adopted by the Holy See, whose purported father had been a Northern Irish seafarer. He is sent to England, to attend a Catholic boarding school in Sussex; after studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies he becomes an interpreter, specialising in the languages and dialects from the region of his birth. The book would be called The Mission Song, a reference to the place where Salvo develops his aptitude for languages, to a jingle sung by one of the characters and to the mission which drives the plot.
As usual, David put much of himself into his character, and indeed the book is told in the first person.* Notwithstanding appearances, Salvo and his creator have much in common. Both grew up without mothers and with fathers who were absent for long periods; David felt effectively orphaned even if he was not literally so. He remembers his childhood as populated by preachers, just as Salvo is surrounded by priests. Like Salvo, he was despatched from a chaotic home to the discipline of a boarding school. ‘I remember not belonging anywhere and taking refuge in a foreign language,’ David has said – like Salvo. After the novel was published David would summarise Salvo’s qualities: ‘a hybrid, caught between worlds, struggling to do the right thing, a bit thick about a lot of things, rash in love, wanting to serve, but serve whom? I can’t pretend he isn’t like someone I used to know fairly well when I was young: me.’34 On the other hand, he and Salvo were obviously different. David could only imagine Salvo’s Congolese background because he had never been there. Even if Salvo had been brought up in England, it would still have been hard for a white man in his seventies to inhabit the mind of a black man in his twenties. Salvo was young enough to be David’s grandson; it was scarcely to be expected that David could share his habits and cultural references, or relate to women in the same way. One of David’s readers had to point out to him that a man of Salvo’s generation was unlikely to charge for his time in guineas.
David had enjoyed writing The Constant Gardener and was attracted by the possibility of another book with an African theme – particularly the white man’s exploitation of Africa’s riches. A dramatic example suggested itself within weeks of the publication of Absolute Friends. In March 2004 a group of mercenaries was arrested at Harare airport, where they had landed to collect a consignment of machine-guns, mortars, assault rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ammunition. Their leader was Simon Mann, an Old Etonian and a former officer in the Scots Guards and the SAS. It was alleged that they were en route to Equatorial Guinea, where they had planned a coup d’état to depose the President, a dictator who had ruled the country with an iron hand since 1979;* indeed, he had himself come to power in a coup. Not that this concerned the mercenaries: prosecutors would allege that they had agreed to install a prominent opposition leader in return for the grant of valuable rights to extract oil to corporations affiliated to the coup’s financial backers. One of these was Sir Mark Thatcher, a fact that ensured worldwide publicity for the thwarted coup; this was only the latest in a succession of embarrassing incidents connected with the son of the former Prime Minister.
David imagined a plot to stage a similar coup, with the object of forming a breakaway state in eastern Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo, known as Zaire until 1997, is a nation the size of Western Europe, blessed by abundant mineral resources but cursed by rampant corruption and lack of infrastructure. It had been destabilised by the incursion of Rwandan refugees after the 1994 genocide, leading to a succession of civil wars and the establishment of heavily armed militias. The country was devastated by disease and sexual violence, by indiscriminate slaughter and by the fighting itself. David had been strongly advised not to go there.
Of course it was hard to write a serious novel about the Congo without a reference to Conrad, and David paid appropriate homage to the Master, with an epigraph taken from Heart of Darkness:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
The action of the book is compressed into a short period of only a few days, and is confined to London and an unnamed island in the North Sea. Salvo is called upon to interpret at a secret conference between the powerbrokers in the mineral-rich region. At first he sees nothing sinister in the plan. As one of the mercenaries puts it, ‘Congo’s been bleeding to death for five centuries’.
Fucked by the Arab slavers, fucked by their fellow Africans, fucked by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the Belgians, the French, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the gold companies, the mineral companies, half the world’s carpetbaggers, their own government in Kinshasa, and any minute now they’re going to be fucked by the oil companies. Time they had a break, and we’re the boys to give it to ’em.
But Salvo is innocent to the point of naïvety. Too
late, he realises that these altruistic protestations are sham, cover for the corporate backers of the coup to secure valuable mineral deposits. When he attempts to make public what he has heard, the authorities step in to silence him: Salvo is detained without trial and his African girlfriend is deported. On one level the book is about ‘old-fashioned colonial exploitation’; but it is also about political hypocrisy and the assault on civil liberties in Tony Blair’s Britain.
David had read and admired the writer and journalist Michela Wrong’s much praised account of her experiences as a foreign correspondent, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (2000). He invited her to lunch at Wilton’s, in Jermyn Street. ‘I want to pick your brains, not too severely, about the Congo,’ he explained in an email. Over the meal he told her that he had an idea for a ‘corking’ story about a translator. ‘I have a beautiful little story to write, but it’s missing its African heart,’ he wrote to her afterwards. ‘I’m looking for a champion researcher, preferably indigenous, because somehow every book I’ve written has thrown one up: somebody who is not daunted by my elementary ignorance, which in this case is pristine, but warms to the theme, drives me nuts, and gets me moving.’35 He was willing to pay handsomely for such help. She replied with a list of possible researchers, as well as offering to work on the book herself. It was agreed that she would act as a second pair of eyes, reading and commenting on what he wrote.
Still furious with George W. Bush, David took part in the Guardian’s attempt to influence the American presidential election of 2004. Together with Antonia Fraser and Richard Dawkins, he launched the newspaper’s letter-writing campaign (‘Operation Clark County’). Guardian readers were encouraged to write to ‘undeclared’ voters in Clark County, a marginal district in the swing state of Ohio, to press home the international ramifications of re-electing President Bush for a second term. ‘Probably no American President has been so universally hated abroad as George W. Bush,’ wrote David, in an open letter to Clark County voters, published initially in the Guardian and subsequently republished in American newspapers and magazines.36 In a letter to his stepmother Jean, David described the response as ‘almost uniformly abusive’.37 The campaign seemed to rile American voters, arousing resentment of foreign interference even in those who might have agreed with the message. In the election, Bush won Clark County by 1,404 votes, and took Ohio by a margin of 2.1 per cent. He was duly re-elected as President.
Six months later David would be invited by the Guardian to interview Tony Blair, in the run-up to another British general election in the spring. Apparently the Prime Minister’s private office had agreed to the proposal in principle. But after much consideration David declined, reckoning that it would be an unequal contest, given his opponent’s experience in debate and the support that he could rely on from his formidable array of spin-doctors. He had no wish to participate in an event that would serve merely as a platform for Blair’s views.
David contributed a short story to the Swiss German-language magazine Du, entitled ‘The King Who Never Spoke’.* This was a simple, childlike tale of a monarch who failed to respond to urging from his royal advisers to make war on his enemies, and who maintained the peace by keeping his silence. It was hard not to see this as an ironic fable about the disastrous impulse of our rulers to take up arms, when they would be better advised to do nothing.
Vivian Green died in January 2005, at the age of eighty-nine. He had been a Fellow of Lincoln since 1952, and Rector of the college from 1983 to 1987, becoming a well-known Oxford figure, instantly recognisable in his green leather trousers and stridently checked jackets. For some years he had lived in a thirteenth-century house in Burford and latterly in a nursing home. David spoke at Green’s memorial service in Oxford, paying warm tribute to his old friend as ‘a preacher who, in the sixty years,† never preached to me, never pulled rank, never asked me why, never said “Don’t do it” or “I told you so” ’. Asking himself who Green had been for him, David answered, ‘a good shepherd, and a proxy father certainly’. He alluded to the fact that he had drawn on Green’s qualities to create George Smiley. ‘No wonder then, when I was searching for a character to guide my readers – and myself – through the fiendish complexities of my fictional plots, that I should have turned once more to Vivian for my support – even if, with the deviousness of the novelist, I didn’t tell him.’38
By this time David had grown accustomed to letters from readers around the world, but even so he was surprised to hear from a reader in space. In April 2005 he received a message from NASA on behalf of Leroy Chiao, then coming to the end of a six months’ tour of duty aboard the International Space Station. Apparently his favourite author was John le Carré.
Chiao, an American of Chinese descent, had a doctorate in chemical engineering. He was an experienced astronaut, who had undertaken a number of space walks during three previous missions aboard the Space Shuttle. Since the Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated on re-entry two years earlier, the Shuttle fleet had been grounded, so Chiao had flown to the Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from a launch site in Kazakhstan.
David agreed to a request to speak to Chiao above the earth. The conversation took place only a few days before Chiao was due to return. David spoke on the landline at Tregiffian, using the kitchen extension. The call lasted twenty-two minutes, which was as long as the ‘window’ permitted. The two men talked about David’s books, and Chiao told him about his new bride, who would be waiting for him at the landing site in Kazakhstan. Afterwards Chiao sent David several emails from the space station, with photographs taken as it passed over Cornwall.* In the summer he and his wife came to lunch with David and Jane at Tregiffian.
That spring David received a letter from the French Embassy, forwarded by David Higham Associates. The Cultural Attaché congratulated him on being nominated to the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Enclosed was a formal letter to this effect from the French Minister of Culture. ‘Cette distinction veut honorer les personnalités qui se sont illustrées par leurs créations dans le domaine artistique ou littéraire, ou par la contribution qu’elles ont apportée au rayonnement de la culture en France et dans le monde.’
The nomination was completely unexpected. David had no hesitation in accepting, despite the fact that he had refused a British honour: he reasoned that the nomination had been made by a cultural committee assembled for the purpose, unlike British awards, which were the product of an obscure ‘advisory’ system managed by ‘the faceless great and good’.
David invited around fifty guests to attend the investiture, which took place early in the evening at the Ambassador’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens. The Ambassador made an impromptu address of welcome; David responded with a short, prepared acceptance speech. He referred to his love of French literature, of Balzac in particular, and concluded with a veiled allusion to the French decision not to take part in the attack on Iraq. He spoke in English, except for his final paragraph of thanks, which was delivered in French. Michela Wrong, who was present as one of his guests, was struck by how good his French was, and how sophisticated his phraseology and grammar.
Afterwards guests were invited to a celebratory dinner at L’Escargot in Soho. David had hired a red double-decker bus to take them there.
David’s discontent at his diminishing sales in America surfaced in a bruising correspondence with his agent. In September 2004 he had warned Bruce Hunter not to make any preliminary soundings about his future work, as he did not consider it settled that he would ‘remain with the present constellation, either in terms of publication or representation’.
Hunter had been David’s agent since 1986. Though David had stipulated at the start that he wanted a business rather than a social relationship, they had become quite close over the years. Hunter and his partner Belinda Hollyer (a writer and publisher of children’s books) regularly dined with David and Jane when they were in London, and visited
them in Cornwall perhaps half a dozen times; in 1997 they had been David’s guests for a fortnight on board a yacht cruising along the Turkish coast, together with two other couples, the film producer ‘Buzz’ Berger and his wife Janet, and Hampstead neighbours Chris Robbins and his wife Mary Agnes Donoghue. They had been among the small group of friends invited to David’s seventieth birthday celebrations in Siena. More recently, however, Hunter had become aware of mounting dissatisfaction from his most important client.
Six months of silence followed before David resumed contact. ‘I am on my way to completing a large, commercial novel, and the time is approaching for me to decide how it should be represented,’ David wrote ominously. ‘Absolute Friends left me with a bad taste I can’t get over,’ he explained. ‘I lost confidence in your commitment to my work, both at a professional & personal level, & have found it hard to recover.’ His instinct was to ask his lawyer, Michael Rudell, to handle the sale of the new book in America, on a fee basis rather than a commission. Hunter protested at the ‘injustice’ of David’s complaints. ‘For the last few years you have been angry, and in that time your anger has fuelled two great novels, and some excellent journalism,’ Hunter suggested. ‘But recently you have turned it on your agent and that is not appropriate.’ Perhaps unwisely, he tried to force the issue of the American rights at the very moment when David had announced that he wanted to ‘keep my head down and get to the end of what I believe will be a big novel’. Hunter had a point: there had been clashes between David’s British and American publishers over the right to sell English-language editions in Europe, and he argued that these could be most easily resolved if he were represented by the same agency in both territories. But David took his letter to be an ultimatum.
