 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Absolute Friends
By John le Carré
Hodder $49.95
 John le Carré's Cold War creation was the memorable spy-catcher George Smiley - played memorably by Alec Guinness - and when peace broke out he turned to the third world settings of Panama and then the international pharmaceutical industry (in The Constant Gardener).
His attention has now moved to that most modern of phenomena, Islamic terrorism and the response of western security forces, penning a fast-paced novel that, predictably, has been slammed as propagandist by American right-wingers.
Indeed, the book is peppered with damning comments about Bush and Blair from various characters, including the 'absolute friends' of the title, an ex-British spook named Ted Mundy, and Sasha, a former East German double-agent.
The two were radical students in 1960s Germany and their paths have crossed regularly, if unexpectedly, over the ensuing years.
When we meet Ted, the Pakistan-born son of a British officer, he is 'sporting a bowler hat and balancing on a soapbox in one of Mad King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria' where he works as an interpreter for English tour groups.
His assets were lost when a partner in a language academy cleaned out their safe and vanished. Soon afterwards, in the Turkish district of Munich, he was approached by a beautiful but poor Muslim woman offering herself for sex. Soon, Mundy has moved into Zara's flat where he sleeps on the couch until they form a relationship.
Each cameo of Mundy's previous life evokes the period superbly: the Oxford socialist becomes a student radical abroad, then a British agent using the cover of British Council cultural tours of the Eastern bloc.
Later comes a failed marriage, emigration to Germany, reconnection with Sasha and finally an inadvertent involvement with a Saudi Arabian-backed 'institute of terror', around which the plot hinges.
"I have had it said to me that your views on recent events in the world coincide remarkably with Sasha's and my own," observes the shadowy Arab boss.
"That war on Iraq was... a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with Al Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity between Saddam and Osama were self-serving bullshit.
"It was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-9-11 psychopathy."
Yet the plot outpaces the polemic as 40 years of political history are seen through the eyes of two superbly-drawn characters.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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