'Turn on your television set, what do you see? The leaders of both sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day. Hooray, it’s all over! Bollocks. Listen to the insiders and you realise the picture hasn’t altered by a brush-stroke.’
‘And if I turn my television off? What will I see then?’
He had ceased to smile. Indeed his good face was more serious than I had ever seen it before, though his anger – if such it was – seemed to be directed at no one but himself. ‘You’ll see us. Hiding behind our grey screens. Telling each other we keep the peace.’ [p. 414]
Moscow in 1987: Niki Landau, a rep for a small British publisher, is handed a manuscript by a mysterious Russian woman, who asks him to give it to his boss. The manuscript is no modern Russian novel, though, but a dossier of top secret material written by a disillusioned physicist, going by the name Goethe, who met Landau's boss -- the dissolute, eccentric, jazz-loving Barley Blair -- at a previous publishing event. Both British and American intelligence services take a keen interest in the manuscript (actually a trio of notebooks, handwritten). Blair, after thorough debriefing, is sent back to Moscow, trying to contact Goethe and to woo Katya.
Palfrey, the seldom-glimpsed narrator of this novel, views it through the lens of his own failed romance with a woman named Hannah ("He’s thinking of his Hannah, I thought. He’s waiting for life to provide him with the moment of choice. It did not occur to me till much later that some people do not take their decisions in quite that way.") but for me, the romance was secondary to the masterful manipulations of MI5, the CIA and possibly the Russian secret services.
Le Carré's prose is moreish: whenever I read one of his novels, I want to reread the others. In The Russia House, I especially enjoyed the scenes in Moscow with ordinary people, the people who perhaps aren't wholly convinced by glasnost (unlike the cheerful American Sheriton, who claims he's always been a 'glasnostic'), the people who are suspicious of change and 'hang on to what [they] understand, even if it is the bars of [their] own gaol'.
Le Carré published The Russia House in 1989, just as Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika were opening up Russia to the West. He says in the Afterword "Was my optimism of twenty-three years ago really so misplaced? Was I really as simple as sceptical heads said of me at the time? Answer, after much cogitation: I hope not. To be in Russia among Russians is to believe in miracles. [p. 443]"
Excellent, slow-burning spy novel with a vivid sense of place and some masterful characterisation.
Fulfils the ‘Set in a city starting with the letter “M”’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. Much of the story takes place in Moscow.
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