John Le Carre has spent years writing about characters who enliven the world of political intrigue: the cunning and manipulative Kurtz; the cerebral, broken-hearted Smiley; the world-weary Leamas.
Sometimes charming, sometimes brooding, always clever, these spies lend credibility to their stories. They are practical operators in a cynical world.
It is unfortunate, then, that Le Carre gives us Bruno Salvador (Salvo) in The Mission Song. A half-Congolese British citizen raised in Africa, he is an interpreter and part-time spy whose innocence is at odds with his past and the world around him.
In the opening pages, Salvo describes a childhood in the presence of over-attentive priests, a marriage that is falling apart and a group of his clients who steal money from their investors, yet he later insists on making morally upright heroes of his masters in the secret service.
One wonders at the man’s gullibility and how he became a spy in the first place.
This naïveté soon becomes responsible for an unsatisfying story too. Called in to interpret African tribal languages for the spies, Salvo learns of a plot to preempt local elections and insert a new leader in the eastern Congo.
His employers have an unsavory role in all of this and Salvo resolves to confront them with evidence and stop the forthcoming action – a fatuous decision that has a predictable result.
Salvo’s innocence is unfortunately necessary to create a story. Without him, The Mission Song would have been another book about a Western power interfering in the developing world’s affairs and getting away with it, a playing out of tired events that can be seen far in advance.
In writing this story, however, Le Carre offers up a character almost as implausible as the story he tells. Salvo is a spy who knows less of the world than his readers.
Kurtz and the other spies would have been disappointed in him.
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