Section:GDN 1N PaGe:12 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 14:26 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
(^12) National
Theatre review
Lucy Prebble’s new
play is a compelling
portrait of the
Litvinenko aff air
Page 22
Le Carré
‘pulls no
punches’
on Brexit in
new novel
Alison Flood
Due out just two days after the elec-
tion Boris Johnson is attempting to
secure on 15 October, John le Carré’s
25th novel depicts Britain in 2018 in
freefall, with “a pig-ignorant foreign
secretary”.
In an extract from Agent Running in
the Field, Nat, a 47-year-old member
of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service
(MI 6), revea ls his career choices to
his daughter. As she picks away at his
beliefs, Nat admits to serious reserva-
tions about the idea of England “as the
mother of all democracies”, with the
country run by “a minority Tory cabi-
net of tenth-raters ... Labour no better.
The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit.”
Le Carré’s editor at Viking, Mary
Mount , said that the novelist “doesn’t
pull his punches” when it comes to
Boris Johnson. “The thing about Le
Carré is that he’s always been as much
at home in Europe as Britain. A man
with his experience of the cold war
could not walk away from the divi-
sions in Britain, and between Britain
and Europe ... After the referendum,
there was no choice for him except to
look at where we are now,” she said.
“It is incredibly prescient, and a
very emotional book in terms of how
connected he feels to the history of
Britain and Europe. There’s no looking
away : he addresses the very current
political crisis.”
Le Carré has long been a critic of
Brexit, putting his name in May to an
open letter in which authors urged
their readers to support the EU. But
he has always been clear that “story
and character must come fi rst” in his
novels – although he told David Hare
in 2001 : “I am now so angry that I have
to exercise a good deal of restraint in
order to produce a readable book.”
In Agent Running in the Field, Nat
plays badminton regularly with an
introspective young man, Ed, who
hates Brexit and Donald Trump and,
said Mount, is “seeking a way to ful-
fi l his ideals ”.
“It’s not bleak because Le Carré
does believe in the young in this book
... there’s a sort of faith in certain kinds
of idealistic people, so I defi nitely
don’t think it’s his bleakest book. I
think it’s ferocious about the politi-
cal establishment, that’s where he puts
real force,” she said.
“He understands people’s motiva-
tions. He’s always been very good at
human frailty,” Mount added. “The
thing I fi nd most exhilarating is the
way he sees through people, not just
in a political sense. He gets to the nub
of what people’s motivations are. And
it’s very thrilling.”
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