With the United States in steep (and willing) decline globally, surrendering its power on the world stage, I’ve looked to the works of John Le Carré for inspiration.
Le Carré’s greatest gift as an espionage writer was chronicling the decline of Great Britain as a world power and doing so with a combination of wistful attitudes and thrilling writing. Yes there’s a lot of talking, a lot of musing in the books and it can take a while to set the stage. But when it is…whew. I was gripping the book like last seventy pages. Le Carré might’ve written these as a rebuke to the James Bond novels but let there be no doubt: they still have the soul of a thriller.
This one has more in common with The Spy That Came in From the Cold than it does with its predecessor Tinker, Tailor. While Smiley is back, cleaning up the mess of the traitor and trying to one-up Karla, we see the action move to another Cold War battleground (Hong Kong) with another agent who gets in over his head but still tries to do the right thing. Until the final third — for reasons I can’t spoil — I really enjoyed Jerry Westerby’s journey and I think he’s one of the more interesting characters Le Carré ever created. He maneuvers through an eastern world beginning trying to heal from centuries of colonization while taking out its anger internally on each other. It’s an unflinching look at what the West has done to southeast Asia and falls in line with the writer’s many themes.
I wasn’t a big fan of Westerby’s motivations near the end; for all the setup here, his rationale to spur the action felt rushed. Also, whoo boy, does Le Carré leave a lot to be desired writing women and AAPI persons. But this is still one of the better books he has written.