John Le Carre's Post Cold War Spycraft

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, some observers who might have had their priorities a little scrambled expressed concern that the end of the Cold War would be a devastating blow to spy fiction. As far as most of the reading public is concerned, this amounted to a concern that it would be a devastating blow to John Le Carré. Twenty-four years later, it seems clear enough that the Cold War needed Le Carré more than Le Carré needed—or wanted—it. The hero of Le Carré’s 1989 novel, The Russia House, ends up betraying British intelligence and the CIA for the sake of the woman he loves. And he does it with a clear conscience, not because he thinks there is no moral difference between the West and the Soviet Union, but because what George Smiley used to call the “Great Game” is winding down, and enough innocent lives have been pointlessly ground up in the process. It’s time to abandon patriotism when it gets in the way of basic decency.