Out of the Cold War and into another murky world

If you haven’t read “The Night Manager” since it came out in 1993, and we hadn’t, now’s the chance with this new paperback edition in the distinctive green livery adopted by Penguin for their books set in the dodgy underworlds of law-breakers and moles. And this le Carré does open nicely, with promise for all those pages ahead.

Jonathan Pine is the English night manager of the luxurious Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich, and he is awaiting the arrival of a party of 16 by private jet from Athens. They are VVIPs, very very important bods; extremely wealthy, in other words. Allowing le Carré to blacken them:

“The doors swung open again, disgorging everyone at once, so that suddenly an entire leftover delegation of the English affluent society was ranged under the chandelier, each of its members so sleekly groomed, so sun rich, that together they seemed to share a corporate morality that outlawed sickness, poverty, pale faces, age and manual labour.”

It’s 1991, the Gulf War is on and the dubious VVIPs are led by the man whose entourage calls him Chief or Dicky, namely Richard Onslow Roper, of Nassau, the Bahamas, but who Pine considers the worst man in the world. Officially a “trader”, Roper is an illegal arms dealer, doling out high-tech death to the world – cost-effective cluster bombs, all-plastic undetectable Glock automatic pistols, Stinger missiles and the latest in hand-held rocket launchers, mortars, anti-personnel mines, chemicals, even a kilo of weapons-grade uranium that fell off the back of a Russian lorry, and suchlike.

His fleets of trucks smuggle across sea and land borders using bribery and deceit, and the best attempts by Whitehall and Washington to nail him have failed. He may have protection in high places. Apart from inter-continental, inter-departmental rivalry in fuggy rooms, there may be officials on the take, an unholy marriage between good and evil. Some at-odds intelligence “shits” show more interest in backstairs machinations, defending those who wear the same old school tie, than in catching the heavies.

Le Carré’s Whitehall gets iffy treatment: “… a jungle but, like other jungles, it has a few watering-holes where creatures who at any other hour of the day would rip each other to pieces may assemble at sunset and drink their fill in precarious companionship.” Nasty.

And governments? “Worse than we are,” says Roper. “They do the deals, we take the fall. Seen it again and again.” Governments offering better terms than their own crooks. President Bush had gone to war to try out “his chaps against the toys he’d flogged to Saddam back in the days when the Iranians were the bad guys.” Who wants too much peace about?

Cairo is in the background, and readers are offered another colourful description: “A fetid oozing pillow of filth hangs over the crumbling tombs of Cairo’s city cemetery. On a moonscape of smoking cinders amid shanties of plastic bags and tin cans, the wretched of the earth are crouched like technicolour vultures picking through the garbage.” Picturesque.

There’s a lot of attractive writing like this and it far outweighs the fluff that tries to be flashy, such as: “Mario the head doorman… using the paddling gait with which porters hope to imprint their images on the fickle minds of clients.” Too clever.

Le Carré uses the time-honoured, story-telling approach beloved of authors and screenwriters of drip-feeding tantalising bits of the past as his tale unfolds. So after the opening with Pine in Zurich, there are passages reflecting on what had happened in Cairo. It’s Zurich, Cairo, Zurich, Cairo and so on until the novel settles down. Flashbacks.

As the blurb says, to catch a criminal you’ve got to become one, and readers may find it somewhat hard to swallow how Pine’s overseers change him from the ever-dependable, smooth and proper hotel employee into an unlikely supposed thief and killer, a man gone rogue so that he will come to the attention of Roper and be accepted into the elite bunch.

This task requires Pine to have the strength and guile of an SAS commando mixed with James Bond. But after all, le Carré tells us, Pine was an ex-army man himself, in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and his Dad was army too. Pine wants to honour his father by accomplishing something a bit more challenging than being polite to rich hotel guests.

And the novelist, having had a short career in the British secret services, had the fallback that he could claim inside knowledge of nefarious goings-on when we innocent readers can’t. The book alternates between Pine’s adventurous doings and the turf wars of the high-ups who pull the strings, and get them in a tangle. The corruption in the intelligence community and political infighting makes for less exciting reading than the action passages.

Pine emerged as the man for the job after he thought he was doing the right thing by society when he became involved in the treacherous affairs of a beautiful lady guest at his previous job, in the Queen Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo. But he ultimately unwittingly caused her murder in the penthouse apartment, victim of a rich Egyptian above the law and in league with Roper.

So when Pine moves hotels and then encounters Roper and party in Zurich, he is ripe for revenge and for recruitment by the honest side of the frustrated secret services. Over months his handlers place a number of fake skeletons in his closet. Pine steals money from the Meister safe, becomes Jack Linden of remotest Cornwall who killed his Aussie mate, lays low in Bristol, works as a cook on a filthy coaling vessel from Lisbon to Canada where he is Jacques Beauregard then Thomas Lamont, plus he has sundry convictions for drug-running.

The “wanted man” is working in the kitchen of a Caribbean restaurant frequented by Roper and gang when a faked hostage-taking involving Roper’s son is staged so Pine can rescue the boy and gain entrée to the VVIP circle. This incident comes at the cost of serious damage to Pine’s face, not the first time he will take severe bodily punishment, but it’s all part of the job, it seems. Sophie of Cairo must be avenged and Roper must be taken down.

“The Night Manager” is a long and complex tale revolving around international arms and drug deals in exotic locales, a backdrop of Central America and its islands, superyachts, Rolls-Royces, Egypt, Canada, damp Whitehall, Swiss Alps, the Cornish coast and Northern Ireland.

John le Carré, born David John Moore Cornwall in Poole, Dorset, in 1931, died in Truro, Cornwall, in 2020 aged 89 years, lives on in his 26 novels, mostly about espionage. The books attracted many awards and honours. This one was his first post-Cold War novel, and was well filmed as a six-part series by the BBC in 2016, fairly faithfully though making the recruiting agent a woman and changing the location and the ending (the latter, at least, probably a decision for the better).

This today is about the latest edition of the book though, and it is a huge dedication to craft, with mastery of the use of words and just occasionally over-doing it in terms of writing and plot.