A Delicate Truth: A Novel
*Starred Review* Shockingly, le Carré no longer writes about moral ambiguity. Gone is any semblance of the notion that a government and its emissaries in the secret services could ever be on the side of the individual. That’s been true for several novels—certainly since The Constant Gardener (2001)—but le Carré’s latest is perhaps the most definitive statement yet of his new worldview. It starts with a 2008 counterterrorism operation, code-named Wildfire, gone wrong. A team of agents, led by a British foreign minister and a private defense contractor, was charged with capturing a terrorist on the island of Gibraltar. Billed as a rousing success, the op was, in fact, a fiasco. Three years later, a now-disgraced British agent tells the real story to retired diplomat Sir Christopher Probyn, also involved in the mission but in the dark as to what actually happened. Probyn eventually teams with Toby Bell, secretary to the minister in charge of Wildfire. Bell, also in the dark, starts digging and finds he faces a personal crisis: expose the cover-up and scuttle his career or keep quiet. Whistle-blowers risking life and livelihood to bring evil bureaucrats to their knees have long been a staple of espionage fiction. In le Carré’s new world, however, evil bureaucrats never skin their knees; there are no happy endings, even attenuated ones. We commented in our 2008 review of le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man (a film version of which will open in the fall) on the slow, inexorable way that, in the novel, “institutional will grinds down individual lives.” That grinding process is even more brutal this time around, as le Carré further establishes himself as a master of a new, shockingly realistic kind of noir in which right-thinking individuals who challenge the institutional order of things always lose. No ambiguity there but plenty of gut-wrenching tragedy.      HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It’s been nearly 50 years since le Carré broke through with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He has set the bar ever since for espionage fiction that appeals to head and heart rather than just quickening the reader’s pulse. --Bill Ott--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.