He was geopolitically alert. December 27, 2018. Tags #review As a sequence of Russian dolls is exposed, the darkest mystery of all – Operation Jericho – drives the narrative to an ingenious and satisfying climax. His readers will know from his first line that they are in the presence of a great enchanter. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré review — lies and spies in the age of Brexit His 25th novel has everything you want from a Le Carré tale, says Robbie Millen. To this reader, that’s a subtle, but deniable, nod of valediction. Not least because, if you think about it, JlC when not writing about The Circus, Smiler, Karla and all (to be fair, we are some 40-odd years after any of that, not withstanding the recent A Legacy Of Spies Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. The question that hangs over John le Carré is whether what he writes still matters. [During the 1950s and 1960s, le Carré worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).] The double nature of the title, sets the scene for a really excellent book. August 6, 2019. Where McEwan refracted his outrage through the prism of Kafka, here’s le Carré, feverish with “the German bug”, doubling down on his renowned and suspenseful opacity with an urgent first-person narrative that ranges from a Battersea health club to a hunting lodge in Karlovy Vary. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré, review: a tale of espionage and betrayal in the age of Brexit 4. by Marina Vaizey Sunday, 20 October 2019. December 11, 2018. Ever since he was propelled into spy fiction by the cold war division of Europe, and the astonishing success of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, le Carré’s de facto muse has been the zeitgeist. Agent Running in the Field is a chilling portrait of our time, now heartbreaking, now darkly humorous, told to us with unflagging tension by the greatest chronicler of our age. “I’d recruited a few. He was young, highly intelligent within the margins of his fixed opinions.” But Ed’s fury at Brexit is dwarfed by what Nat finds leaking from the higher echelons of the Office: a desperate plan, code-named Jericho, for Britain to retain the good graces of a rogue American administration by doing some very bad things to its former European friends. Nat, an over-the-hill British spook, plus his semi-detached wife, Prue, is coming to terms with being put out to grass at 47. Our narrator, of course, is a spy: Nat, 47, a member of what le Carré used to call “the Circus” but in this book has become “the Office”. Book Review: John le Carré, Agent Running In The Field. Nat, meanwhile, takes a tremendously atmospheric trip to the Czech Republic to meet an old agent of his: Arkady, whom Nat had temporarily turned as a double agent against Putin’s FSB. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15. By Richard Marcus, BLOGCRITICS.ORG. The publicity for Agent Running in the Field has emphasised the fact that this is le Carré’s Brexit novel, and so it is, laced with fury at the senseless vandalism of Brexit and of Trump, and the way the one is driving Britain into the clammy embrace of the other. The master storyteller’s latest is spiced up with political references but the ultimate enemy stays the same. That phrase, and the building’s air of shabby irrelevance, are pleasurably reminiscent of the “slow horses” consigned to Slough House in the excellent modern spy novels about a group of MI5 failures and troublemakers by Mick Herron. Le Carré has not lost his master storyteller’s command of momentum. Last month, it was Ian McEwan’s satire, The Cockroach; now it’s John le Carré’s latest thriller: two contemporary masters compelled into print by Brexit’s bonfire of ancient verities. Robbie Millen. John le Carré: Agent Running in the Field review - fake news, Brexit and Cold war echoes . At 288 pages, Agent Running in the Field is a miniature compared with le Carré’s great cold war novels, and it lacks the ruthless clockwork precision of, say, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is dramatic chamber music, in which mere conversation provides all the suspense and slow-dawning revelation you could want at any scale. In Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré, who celebrates his 88th birthday this weekend, has integrated the subject and his anger about it into fiction much more thoroughly and seductively. Their brief reunion is another spectacular set piece and Arkady is one of le Carré’s wonderful cameos: now a self-made kleptocrat living in maximum-security retirement, he sweats and weeps affection, but also hatred, for his former spymaster. Book Review: 'Agent Running in the Field' by John Le Carre. The author leaves the reader to draw the disturbing inference that this – in the age of ambient corporate and state surveillance by ubiquitous technology – is simply the way we all live now. But also Agent-Running, In The Field. This is the twentysomething Ed, who befriends our narrator at his badminton club and then, after their weekly games, discourses furiously on the state of the world. This novel, however, is neither a hissy fit nor a high-noon shootout, but an autumnal threnody that reconciles rage to storytelling. In “Agent Running in the Field,” Le Carré spins the excellent tale of an aging British intelligence agent tasked with facing down Moscow and her sleeper agents, a … Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Like its bestselling predecessor, A Legacy of Spies, this new book demands the tribute of a rereading as much as a reading. This may not be the finest novel he has ever written – Tinker, Tailor and the other great novels of the 1970s remain in a league of their own – but it’s still touched with his magic. Agent Running in the Field bridges Le Carré’s old and new heroes. Agent Running In the Field doesn’t make it any brighter. “I knew the breed,” Nat reflects. The Son of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Le Carré’s portrait of Nat, the half-Scots half-Russian career spy whose final assignment “light miles from the mainstream” in “the Haven” goes horribly awry in the margins of the Brexit “clusterfuck”, is cleverly persuasive and unreliable in the same breath. Karla and the iron curtain are long gone and Britain’s spies cling to the wreckage as best they can, while turning a blind eye to post credit-crunch corruption. Even the most apparently innocuous dialogue may be coded and ambiguous, serving two opposed purposes simultaneously: one meaning for the secret grey listeners, who in le Carré’s world are always assumed to be paying attention, and another meaning altogether for the participants. (A veteran spymaster named Valentina, she does all the work with her seductive voice.) The master storyteller’s latest is spiced up with political references but the ultimate enemy stays the same. Agent Running is right on the money, in psychology as much as politics, a demonstration of the British spy thriller at its unputdownable best. Angrier still, one of le Carré’s puppets describes the foreign secretary as a “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”. Motivated by despair and disbelief, both these first responders to our crisis of political faith seem to have found consolation in literature. Agent Running in the Field review – Brexit fuels John le Carré’s fury. Agent Running in the Field is the latest offering from John Le Carré, the acknowledged master of espionage fiction. John le Carré: ‘confirming his place at the head of his profession’. Remarkably, more than 50 years on, this source of inspiration has not deserted him with Agent Running in the Field. ohn le Carré’s novels contain flurries of physical activity – moodily described surveillance, dead-letter drops, the very occasional shooting – but the real action is always two people talking in a room. Lest this all sound too much like a hardcore remainer conspiracy theory, be assured that the novel also contains, like any good James Bond film, a Russian femme fatale. The master of the spy genre takes aim at Brexit and Trump in a classy entertainment about political ideals and deception. We are among the broken statues of old empires. Le Carré delivers a tale for our times, replete with the classic seasoning of betrayal, secret state shenanigans and sad-eyed human frailty, all baked into an oven-hot contemporary thriller that’s partly inspired by the machinations of 21st-century Ukraine, today more than ever the fatal crossroads of great power politics. It is dramatic chamber music, in which mere conversation provides all the suspense and slow-dawning revelation you could want at any scale. It seems there was a bus I could have taken.”. His new novel contains several delicious set pieces of this kind, and each time one gets going there is the sense of a master enjoying himself hugely: the characters themselves seem to become cleverer and wittier as their puppeteer’s dialogic invention takes flight. ‘The Scientist and the Spy’ Review: Agent Running in the Field An unusual FBI investigation illustrates the government’s evolving response to China’s stealing American industrial secrets. Perhaps le Carré is keeping a fond eye on his younger apprentices. Le Carré’s indignation at the “unmitigated clusterfuck” of Brexit is unmediated by any third-person mask of discretion. John le Carré: Agent Running in the Field review - fake news, Brexit and Cold war echoes Masterly spy writer's latest is a sharply contemporary thriller. While "Agent Running in the Field" isn’t a breathtaking thriller, it is a breathing and alive contemporary tale. Agent Running in the Field is the latest book from one of my favorite British authors, John le Carre. Not many writers half his age could so successfully put Goethe and Sting into the same sentence. Note: This review is by my husband Jim. It was as sharp as all of his previous espionage novels, and one just needs to hang on for a lot of thrilling twists and turns, but I promise that it will make sense as we see all of these disparate threads come together in such a satisfying ending. A Tale Of 'Cold War'-Crossed Lovers. John le Carré’s novels contain flurries of physical activity – moodily described surveillance, dead-letter drops, the very occasional shooting – but the real action is always two people talking in a room. His devoted readers will note that agent-runner Nat in the Haven is a long way from Smiley and the Circus. Winningly, on Nat’s return home le Carré punctures the rich, nostalgic melodrama of this encounter with a touch of bureaucratic bathos: “London … has reimbursed my travel expenses, but questioned my use of a taxi to the lakeside hotel in Karlovy Vary. John le Carré’s latest novel, Agent Running in the Field, realistically and informatively describes spy tradecraft like only an experienced insider can. • Agent Running in the Field is published by Viking (£20). Nat’s new berth, the Haven, is a decrepit building in a Camden back street, “the Office’s home for lost dogs”. Nat’s “rugged charm” and awkward relationship with his nemesis, Ed Shannon, the solitary badminton ace who’s raging at a world turned upside down, seems prescient and poignant. Nat is indulgent of his new friend Ed, partly because he enjoys their badminton games and partly because he feels a fatherly fondness towards him. In a World Where No One Speaks Jive. It can sometimes seem, indeed, as though the rest of the book comprises merely the stuff that has to be efficiently moved into place, just so, in order that these charged conversations become possible. • Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré is published by Viking Penguin (£20). You May Also Like. A few months back, the congruously named Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain's MI 6 foreign intelligence agency, took an uncharacteristically public swipe at John le Carré and his work. When Nat commits himself to Operation Rosebud, he will step into the usual wilderness of mirrors: double and triple loyalties, competing aliases and half-forgotten codenames (Pitchfork, Stardust, Woodpecker). ), evergreen at 87, turns … At 288 pages, Agent Running in the Field is a miniature compared with le Carré’s great cold war novels, and it lacks the ruthless clockwork precision of, say, The Spy Who Came in … It’s his 25th novel, joining a list highlighted by such classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Tailor of Panama (1996), and The Constant Gardener (2001). In the end, it’s the threat of Moscow Centre that will motivate Nat towards his final, desperate and most audacious covert operation, closing with 15 perfect lines about Nat’s “exfiltration”. Nat, the narrator and protagonist,… His devoted readers will note that agent-runner Nat in the age of is. 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