The reach of the Russian Mafia

CRIME: TERENCE BROWN reviews Our Kind of Traitor , By John le Carré, Viking/Penguin, 306pp, €16.99

CRIME: TERENCE BROWNreviews Our Kind of Traitor, By John le Carré, Viking/Penguin, 306pp, €16.99

IN MAY last year the novelist James Lee Burke, himself among the greatest practitioners of what can loosely be termed crime or mystery fiction, claimed that the genre for the first time was being taken seriously as literature. The occasion was an interview he gave just before accepting the title of grand master from Mystery Writers of America. He further claimed that in our time, in the US, writers of crime and mystery novels have taken over from writers who in the 1930s and 1940s employed fiction as a tool of sociological investigation of the American condition. And, as if on cue, this year from Cambridge University Press, no less, came the Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, according indisputable academic respectability to a mode of literature that Burke felt had in the past been unjustifiably demeaned.

The editor of this worthy collection of essays by various hands (its worthiness vitiated somewhat by its failure to consider the work of Burke or of that other contemporary American master Elmore Leonard) included in her book an essay on American spy fiction, in which the English author under review here gets a brief comparative mention in association with Graham Greene and Frederick Forsyth.

I’m pretty sure what John le Carré would think about all this, especially about academia turning its sights on the spy fiction that has been a main field of his literary operations since the 1960s. He would, I imagine, be less than impressed. For this current work has as its protagonist a young Oxford don anxious to escape the vacuity of his life teaching English literature to unresponsive undergraduates for something more challenging, like the long-distance running and mountaineering with which he fills his vacations. This allows le Carré the occasional chance to stigmatise academics, as when he has his hero speak “swiftly and intensely, not into the middle air where academics find their traditional refuge”.

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But the author knows, of course, that in England Oxbridge has been involved in espionage at least since the 1930s and that since then the academic and the clandestine worlds have often intermingled (donnish eccentricity not being the sole preserve of the groves of academe). For it was in the 1930s, when the sociological novel flourished in Britain as in the United States, that young men were lured from the ancient universities into Soviet spy rings; and Oxbridge remains a recruiting ground for the British secret services. In Our Kind of Traitor, one notes, when its hero is drawn into a world of financial corruption and systemic threat to the City of London from the Russian Mafia, he turns to a slightly older don to put him in touch with "certain people" in the capital.

The young Oxford lecturer of the book is forced into this decision to contact the security services, which runs against the grain of his leftist radicalism, following a holiday with his barrister girlfriend (who is torn between hoped-for motherhood and the rewards afforded by professional success) on a Carribean island where the duo fall in with a bizarre domestic menage headed by an extraordinary paterfamilias, who challenges our hero to a tennis match.

The first stages of the novel are very skilfully constructed, as events occurring in Antigua are juxtaposed with the debriefing sessions that Perry and Gail, the innocent holidaymakers of the novel’s early scenes, undergo with “certain people” when they are back in London. Slowly an unnervingly strange world is unfolded to us that has taken Perry’s Russian tennis opponent (tennis in Antigua and Paris play key parts in the book’s plot), one Mr Dima, from the Gulag to master of the universe as money launderer to the world.

Dima’s family, his entourage and he himself, with his fractured English and mercurial personality, are marvellous literary inventions, and their exoticism and the vulnerable power of Dima as threatened Mafioso-style don (that word again) help to explain how people like Perry and Gail could become so deeply embroiled in their lives that they are prepared to be go-betweens in Dima’s attempt to betray his fellow criminals in exchange for sanctuary along with his family in an England of “fair play”, where the reach of the Russian Mafia extends to the very heights of government.

The central section of the novel offers us le Carré (creator of the famous Smiley) on home ground, as it it were, for it dramatises conflict and subterfuge within the security services as to how Dima’s desire to turn king’s evidence is to be treated. In this the figure of Hector Meredith emerges in the book as one to vie with the commanding Dima as a focus of readerly interest. (Neither Perry nor Gail really convinces as more than an instrument to spring a plot; as a rising star in the Oxford English faculty, however disillusioned, Perry seems curiously unmarked by any contemporary developments in his field, while Gail’s growing concern for Dima’s offspring and the two orphaned children in his company seems a simplistic displacement of motherly instincts.)

Intellectual (he quotes the Polish anti-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski at one point and reads the London Review of Books), driven, a self-confessed maverick in the service, a passionate patriot disguised as "a Head of College of the old dotty sort", it is Meredith who advances the thesis that financial subversion should be a matter for the secret services since it threatens the integrity of the state itself. He seems to win this battle. How he fares in the war is another matter. It seems that Dima is to be accommodated, and the final stages of the book are a page-turning account of how he is snatched, hidden in Switzerland and prepared for clandestine flight for Blighty in best thriller fashion.

In the publicity material that was circulated with this book an article of December 13th, 2009, in the Observerwas reprinted without comment. Its republication in this form implied, however, that Meredith in the book has effectively served as a mouthpiece for the author. That article reported, in line with Meredith's concerns in the text of the novel, how a UN advisor had claimed that drug money had been used to stabilise the world financial system at the height of the crisis of 2008. The Observer's writer observed: "This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis." The reprinting of this article is a clear signal that le Carré is using "literature" to make a sociological and political intervention, and in his new book he does so in a way that this reader found both compellingly effective and extremely alarming.

Terence Brown’s

The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism

was recently published by Cambridge University Press