Fall from grace
Blunt passion trumps ambiguity in a disappointing novel from John le Carré
The Mission Song
By John le Carré
Little, Brown, 339 pp., $26.99
John le Carré is back in Africa, this time Congo, with another cri de coeur.
He takes us to the Kivu region, in the eastern part of the country, rife with an impenetrable array of ethnic groups and languages. We learn of the Mai Mai and Simba, the Banyamulenge and the Bembe. We hear about tongues like Kinyamulenge and Shi and confront references to Lumbumbists.
You read all this with the small terror that you may be quizzed on it later. For most of his career, le Carré spared us the aura of a State Department exam. He meted out sense of place to great effect with admirable spareness. Secure in his narrative skills, he camouflaged it, almost in passing, amid his lambent prose. His signal goal, after all, was tension, not topography. Not this time.
Like his earlier, superior, African book, `` The Constant Gardener, " `` The Mission Song " trades the moral ambiguity that characterized le Carré's great Cold War run for a flat clarity separating good and evil. Once again, he has remixed his palette from gray to black and white.
The West, he reminds us, has plundered Congo for ages. The odious King Leopold II of Belgium set the standard for appalling transgressions there in the late 1800s . His ghost returns in `` The Mission Song " as a shadowy group of mercenaries and corrupt British heavyweights called the Syndicate.
Their plan, tacitly condoned by a wing of British intelligence, is to stage a coup in Kivu, install a puppet promising fair elections, then drain the region of its bounty of minerals. Where the evil ones in `` The Constant Gardener " were the pharmaceuticals -- a rather modern group of black hats -- these Brit baddies are utterly traditional.
More than a few have linked the loss of ambiguity in le Carré's work to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the demise of Communism, the theory holds, there was no future for George Smiley and his ilk. But this misses the point. Le Carré's penchant for the cri de coeur has little to do with geopolitical shifts. Had he so chosen, he could have maintained his wilderness of mirrors in Africa or anywhere else.
The change was one of heart. Maybe his sense of the underdog simply sat up and barked. Maybe he got spiritual. Whatever the case, like Graham Greene before him, his hatred of imperialism in any form flowered.
Perhaps now, fans still praying like Elvis Is Alive stalwarts for a reprise of le Carré's Cold War brilliance will finally form a Smiley 12-step program. The master spy disappeared 15 years ago, folks, so get over it. Le Carré is the greatest spy novelist of our time and at 74 has earned the right to do whatever he wants. For better or worse, this is it.
That said, the man writes less with his head these days, and his passion can get tiresome. One casualty is the primacy of story. Another is language, always a joy in the past. It is sad to report that what `` The Mission Song " does not do much of is sing.
The tale is also hobbled by problems of narration and structure. For starters, le Carré dumps a big, complicated story on the shoulders of a 29-year-old named Bruno Salvador, known universally as Salvo, who was born in Congo of an errant Catholic missionary and native mother and raised in a mission there.
Salvo ends up in England, an endlessly attractive young man with a top-flight education. He marries a well-born, adulterous journalist and launches a career as an interpreter -- for private industry and, occasionally, government intelligence -- in the array of African languages he learned as a child. He rides a fast track as an outsider in both his native and chosen cultures.
The story hinges on a secret conference where the Syndicate suborns three Kivu warlords and a charismatic Congolese leader to join its nasty plot. This claustrophobic affair occupies far too much of the book and does damage to the pace of the story.
During the powwow, Salvo is tasked by the Syndicate to translate the proceedings into multiple languages as well as monitor the sub rosa exchanges among the players during breaks through hidden cameras and recorders. He was initially convinced he was doing the right thing for God and country, but as the horror of the plot becomes clear to him, he does his inept best to stop it.
It's all a bit much for the kid to carry, really. For most of the book, Salvo totes the story with a sophistication beyond his years, only to display in its denouement a naivete that is literally unbelievable.
And then there is Hannah, a nurse from Congo who represents all that is good and pure about Africa. She and Salvo meet at a London hospital, where he translates the Kinyarwanda of a dying man for her, and they fall desperately in love. She remains more symbol than character, even when pulling a fast one on Salvo and the Syndicate for the good of her homeland.
At the end of the day, `` The Mission Song " is a story about the rude education of Bruno Salvador. It is a bildungsroman of sorts in which this cultural mongrel finds himself and the rest of us, I hate to say it, find ourselves missing the good old days once again.
Sam Allis is a member of the Globe staff. 