MI6

Nick Harkaway, aka Nicolas Cornwell, sets us down in the mid 1960s in this, his second re-imagining of the world of British Intelligence during the Cold War years, a world so memorably portrayed in his father’s novels about George Smiley and ‘The Circus’, properly known as MI6. When Bill Haydon, a field operative is shot and wounded in a Helsinki market, George Smiley is told to investigate. Haydon’s companion, a woman called Lara Koski, was killed in the exchange, as was a man who is later identified as Rolan Gusev, a Russian agent. Gusev was due to fly on to America, where he was booked in to stay at The Reconstruction Club, a luxurious Los Angeles establishment regarded by the CIA as a place with strong links to Soviet Russia.

Another Circus operator, Roy Bland, is meanwhile experiencing problems of his own in Leningrad, where he is staying in a health spa. Bland, officially employed in Bulgaria, is one of the more unusual Circus employees. Although highly educated and multilingual, he is of working class origins. He was brought up in east London, where his father was a docker. ‘Control’, the otherwise nameless boss of The Circus, believes that Gusev was on his way to California to make contact with a Russian spy deeply embedded within the American intelligence services, and he is anxious to find out who this person is. Why? Although Britain was still, notionally, an international power, its post – Suez reputation is not good, particularly in the eyes of the Americans.

To use a seasonal metaphor, it is Britain’s autumn, and the trees, with their leaves blasted away by strong winds, are nearly bare. The American CIA are blunt, disruptive and vigorous. They view the inherent caution and subtlety of MI6 as fey and ineffective. Roy Bland, almost by accident has discovered what might be a key to unmasking the American spy, and it is in Leningrad where most of the serious action takes place. Bland is on the verge of applying for Russian citizenship, more through expediency than conviction, because he realises that his high profile defection may give him the opportunity to help Control.

Smiley, meanwhile, is sent to California, ostensibly to attend a conference but, in reality, to discover why Gusev was headed to Los Angeles, and who he was scheduled to meet. Along the way, we rub shoulders with many of Le Carre’s stock characters, such as the fiercely intelligent Connie Sachs and the devious Toby Esterhase. The more vigorous action – shootings, seduction, film negatives hidden in waste pipes and other skullduggery all takes place in Leningrad, but the quiet and persistent wisdom of George Smiley – ostensibly a mere bookkeeper or accounts clerk – which unmasks the traitor.

Finland features tangentially in the narrative, and it is worth remembering its strange place in European history. Having valiantly resisted the Russians in The Winter War, they then cosied up to Hitler, but suffered a savage revenge by Stalin after the war. The title? It originated in England’s Gunpowder Plot. An unidentified participant had the job of accompanying Fawkes on his fatal mission, carrying a shielded flame to be used in an emergency. In modern espionage terms, it has been used to describe a survivor of a busted spy plot, who keeps his or her head down and keeps the faith while the network is being destroyed above their heads. This is not easy reading. The plethora of references to the original books keeps us on our toes, but Harkaway preserves the enigma of the ‘little round man’, the impenetrable and unknowable George Smiley. The Taper Man will be published by Penguin/Viking on 5th November.

Chris Humphreys introduced us to his hitman anti-hero Mr Phipps in One London Day, which I reviewed earlier this year. In that story, the murderous Phipps was hired by The Shadows, a rogue group of financiers who were subverting justice and posing a threat to the national good. His mission was to kill their accountant. This he did, but not without causing collateral damage, one instance of which was brutally beating Stanley, a young London football thug. That act will come back to haunt him in this novel, where he is hired in joint enterprise by MI5 and MI6 to take out a target in Germany.

The target is Olsen, a former STASI officer who is now running a people smuggling operation using refrigerated lorries. MI6 want him dead, but MI5 and one of their top women, known as Ellerby, would rather go down the legal route using arrest and formal trial. Cleverly, perhaps to distract us from the moral shortcomings of Mr Phipps, Humphreys creates a genuine monster in Berndt Olsen. His titular father was an SS officer, but his blood father was a Red Army rapist. The acne that rendered him monstrous as a youngster has been tamed by the use of Royal Jelly from his beehives, but his mental scars are open and unhealed. He selects young girls from his potential passengers, and uses them terribly.

Humphreys sets the Berlin scene beautifully. The major players are all there, but we are yet to see how their worlds will collide. Phipps, posing as a football fan in town for an international match; Ellerby, dining with an old cop friend, hoping that she can persuade the BND (the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst) to cooperate; Olsen, moving smoothly through the world of privacy and security his wealth has bought; Sadiq Khan, the only member of The Shadows to evade justice, being wined and dined by Olsen in an exclusive gentlemen’s gated complex; Stanley, ostensibly in town to watch a football match, but more interested in smuggling a huge payload of class A pharmaceuticals back to England. There is another person of interest – Wolfgang, Olsen’s formidable neo-Nazi chauffeur and bodyguard.

We are given something of an explanation into why Phipps is a borderline psychopath, and it is because of his harrowing time as a soldier in Afghanistan. Humphreys reminds us, not that it was strictly necessary, that Afghanistan is a bestial, bigoted and benighted hell-on-earth, and that people from The West have, for centuries, been fooling themselves that they can change the place, from the disastrous forays of the mid 19th century to the equally catastrophic interventions of more recent times.

When Ellerby receives the bum’s rush from her contact at the BND, she is left with with no option but to pull the metaphorical trigger on Olsen, by sending a text to Phipps which will set him loose to eliminate Olsen. I’m struggling to find the best metaphor for how the novel plays out, but it involves vehicles, be they trains or cars, converging on – not a crossroads, because that implies just four ways – a point of collision. Do the good guys win? Yes, of course, but in unexpected ways, Olsen’s end being particularly painful and inventive.

The author betrays some political bias during the narrative. He clearly thinks that the AfD is bad for both Germany and Europe. I might disagree with his stance, but this doesn’t dilute my admiration for a brilliant political thriller, which blends traditional Noir with the genre of the flawed-but-reluctantly-sympathetic hired killer. One Berlin Day will be published by Allison & Busby on 17th September.