A call to arms for ringmaster le Carre
ON a steamy Hongkong afternoon in 1993, the phone rings, a voice from England answers. ''Hello, this is John le Carre. Is this conversation being taped?'' What more appropriate start to an interview with a man constantly identified with his best known creation, George Smiley, master spy? This incident was less sinister though, merely a polite enquiry as to whether my shorthand was up to speed.
Le Carre - alias David Cornwell - was on the phone to talk about his latest novel, The Night Manager (Hodder and Stoughton $195), a book far removed from the Cold War of 60s Berlin, the setting for the author's first major success The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Thirty years on and we're into the permafrost cynicism of arms dealing - no politics, no morality, no price too high.
The sale of illegal hardware is global business and le Carre travelled extensively in Switzerland, northern Canada, the US and South America to research his book. (And to answer the ubiquitous question: no he didn't take in Hongkong, the base for his 1977 novel The Honourable Schoolboy, nor is the territory on his foreseeable agenda.) Anger and frustration at witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall during his time as a ''secret servant'' at the British Embassy in Konigswinter, were the catalysts that spurred le Carre to write The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in just six weeks.
The inspiration for The Night Manager is more complex and a reflection of the turmoil that's afflicted world politics since then.
''What got this one going was something more mystical,'' said the 62-year-old author, citing for starters: ''Thirteen years of British mis-rule; that Britain is now a one-party state; and the country-wide spread of corporate rot.'' Whereas before he had concentrated on what he terms ''the secret world theatre'' of spying, he has now seen that the kind of clandestine activity of the secret world was also prevalent in the overt one.
''We [Britain] have had a string of major government scandals over the past 10 years,'' he said, citing the Matrix Churchill scandal by which a ban on the sale of arms to Iraq was simply bypassed by government ministers. ''They were selling arms to the Iraqis. Not even for monetary gain . . . it was more incompetence than conspiracy.'' Le Carre also cites the BCCI scandal as an example of clandestine dealings in the public eye. ''The Bank of England and others in the industry sector were involved,'' he said. ''Not, perhaps, for their own gain, but certainly for the general prosperity of the city.'' Then there was ''the Guinness affair, another example of corporate rot in the city; big firms collapsing amid reports of shady relations, and the end of the Maxwell empire''.