Absolute Friends – John le Carré, 2003 ½★

Absolute Mess

John le Carré’s Absolute Friends is his most discussed fictional foray into direct political argument, so much so you’d think from the press reviews that the whole book is nothing more than a 450-page denouncement of President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. 

Actually, the novel takes quite a long time being about that, or indeed, about anything else.

This is le Carré at his most frustrating and his most tedious.

Ted Mundy is a British expatriate who makes a modest living as a tourist guide in Bavaria when he is contacted by an old friend, Sasha. A long flashback details their time together, first as non-violent radicals at a West German commune in the 1960s and, decades later, as spies operating behind the Iron Curtain. In both cases, Sasha pushed Mundy to follow what they believed was the right path. Now, in 2003, Sasha has a new mission for Mundy. This time Mundy hesitates, wondering if the once-peaceful Sasha has changed into something darker.

There are several problems with Absolute Friends. First, as a character study it never cohered into anything substantial. At times it felt like a rewrite of A Perfect Spy with both Mundy and Sasha having father issues and later on, Mundy struggling over how much his identity was being reshaped by his spying. le Carré wants you to like the guy, but his characterization is too mopey and superficial.

“He’s a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example,” le Carré writes of Mundy. “He’s a frozen child who is beginning to thaw out.”

The build-up for Mundy meanders for quite a while, with most of the early focus on a relationship with a Turkish woman and her son which comes across as both manipulative and minor to the direction of the rest of the novel.

After that, le Carré begins a deep dive into Mundy’s past, beginning with his Pakistani upbringing and his political education upon arriving in England parentless and disregarded. Under the tutelage of a Marxist instructor, he becomes sufficiently radicalized that when he comes to Germany to continue his college education, he is swiftly caught up in the same political currents that produced the Baader-Meinhof Group, albeit in Mundy’s case of a non-violent kind.

It’s here that Mundy meets Sasha and the real story of Absolute Friends starts to unfold, more than 60 pages in. This sort of ambling construction might be okay if it weren’t the rule for the rest of the book, le Carré indulging himself in long descriptive discursions with little bearing to the plot. It gets to another issue with the novel, how chunky and off-putting the narrative is. Because we begin in the (then) present day, the long detour into Mundy’s past means we spend some 200 pages in flashback mode, everything filtered through le Carré’s ruminative lens.

That said, this is also the best part of Absolute Friends, at least near the beginning when we are introduced to Sasha. He’s the leader of this left-wing commune based in Berlin whom Mundy joins in 1969. Not that there’s much story here, but the atmosphere feels right, and the politics are leavened for the only time by humor.

“There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse,” Sasha tells Mundy early on. “In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.”

Author John le Carré as he appears on his website. Image from www.johnlecarre.com.

Sasha radicalizes Mundy further, while at the same time speaking movingly against the nihilism of violence as represented by the Baader-Meinhof Group. Sasha’s monologues fill pages, something other reviewers found tedious but brought me as close as I ever got to a sense of what Sasha (and Mundy, for that matter) are supposed to be about.

The Berlin episode ends in a sudden burst of violence directed against Sasha’s group by German police. But Mundy’s long flashback continues; he recalls his early adulthood after being separated from Sasha. This section rambles on quite a ways, with Mundy moving to New Mexico for a failed writing career and then marrying a woman who becomes active in the moderate wing of the British Labour Party. Struggling for some direction, Mundy takes on a job leading a Shakespeare company traveling through Eastern Europe.

It is here Sasha returns again, and Absolute Friends veers into familiar le Carré mode. Sasha, it turns out, now works for the East German secret police, the Stasi, but has become disillusioned by the GDR’s failed brand of socialism. Sasha enlists Mundy in a scheme to collect genuine intelligence for the British while retailing bad info to the East Germans.

“It is said by one of your English writers that with double agents one never knows whether one is getting the fat or the lean,” Sasha tells Mundy. “I shall supply [British intelligence controller] Mr. Arnold with the lean. In return, you and he will supply Comrade Sasha with the fat.”

It’s a puzzlement how Sasha and Mundy so easily flip from radical leftists to covert Cold Warriors in the novel. le Carré suggests a revelation about the real identity of Sasha’s father plays a part, but this seems both superficial and forced. Given Sasha’s radical fires burn as hot as ever (“Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place? It will pick it dry”), his throwing in with the cowboys and their British allies is never adequately explained.

Sasha and Mundy’s spy time gets only a brief section of Absolute Friends. le Carré doesn’t really much care about developing any kind of suspense here; his focus is on Mundy’s ever-present struggle with his identity. Is he a double- or a triple-agent? This is a well le Carré has been to a number of times, like with A Perfect Spy and The Little Drummer Girl, and he has nothing to add this time. A couple of spy runs are limned over, the Berlin Wall comes down, Sasha disappears again.

By this time, I was wondering if this was really the book I had read about which contained le Carré’s scathing attack on the Iraq invasion. The book opens with some thoughts on the matter channeled by an angry Mundy, but then the subject disappears for the next 350 pages.

There is a mid-book appearance by an American intelligence operative, a shadowy figure named Roarke who leaves an uneasy feeling after debriefing Mundy during his period as a spy. “[H]e embodies what Mundy considers the least attractive characteristic of both our Western leaders and their spokesmen: a levitational self-belief that nimbly transcends the realities of human suffering,” le Carré writes.

This is a traditional tack of le Carré whenever writing of Americans; we might as well be orcs hatched in Mordor for all the humanity he sees in our benighted nationality. It offends me on that basis, but also as a betrayal of le Carré’s own craft, which otherwise prizes subtlety and a multi-faceted perspective in looking at what makes people tick.

In the last section of the book, Sasha returns, as does Roarke. Sasha has a new cause for Mundy to ally himself with, while Roarke claims Sasha’s cause is in fact a murderous hoax cooked up by the same people who were behind 9/11.

Mundy wonders who is telling the truth. You don’t, however, because you already know how le Carré views Americans and their filthy lies.

It’s hard to explain how bad the ending is. It’s like le Carré took his slender narrative framework and tossed it in the air out of pique. Clearly the Iraq invasion happened while the book was well underway, and he wanted to say something about that, but what he produces does nothing to resolve any of the modest interest I had in the relationship between Ted and Sasha, or what Ted’s journey was supposed to be about.

In fact, what you get at the end is an abandonment of the Ted and Sasha story in exchange for a shrill lampoon in which a complacent Western media covers a CIA-directed atrocity by blaming Islam. You can feel the steam pouring out of le Carré’s ears as he sends up everyone from New Labour to Judith Miller to Fox News in a tone of heavy, unbecoming sarcasm.

le Carré has a singular gift for writing, and for plunging you into different places and times with commanding authority. His way of starting chapters alone has a quality of high art in miniature I really enjoy, and that is on fine display through some of the middle chapters, ramble though they do. But this is one of those books where the writing is let down by the other things a novel is supposed to deliver; characters, story, resolution. Simply put, it’s an absolute mess.