'A Most Wanted Man' by John Le Carre - Book Review

John Le Carre’s reputation is substantially based on our confidence that he knows what he is talking about, which is why I found reading this book so disconcerting. The central character, Issa Karpov – or the person who claims to be Issa Karpov – tells a story, on which the whole plot depends, which cannot possibly be true, and yet nobody notices this or comments on it. The book was published in 2008 and is set in the present, i.e. not later than the summer of 2008. “Issa Karpov” is a young man who claims to be the child of a Russian army Colonel Karpov by a Chechen girl abducted during the Chechnya war. Presumably this is Yeltsin’s war of 1994-96, in which case Issa must be between 11 and thirteen years old in 2008. But the “Issa Karpov” who turns up to claim $12.5 million, from his father’s banker, through a German lawyer, on this basis seems to be about 10 years older, early twenties or late teens at best. The British “espiocrat” Ian Lantern remembers Colonel Karpov telling him at the time of the Chechnya campaign (11-13 years earlier) about this Chechen girl he has got pregnant, and the son and heir that results, so British Intelligence, at least, are aware that the “Issa” who turns up cannot be that same son and heir. This should also have been obvious to the lawyer and the banker. The refugee lawyer, meeting a young man who claims to be a the child of a girl kidnapped by invading soldiers, should observe that this means he’s only 11-13 years old: the banker, getting a claim to a $12.5m fund from a minor, should ask for some sort of legal guardian. So: how do we read it? Is Issa a fraud, or is he telling the truth? If he is telling the truth, we have a really disconcerting narrative, with the worrying paedophile implications of the sexual tension between this child and his lawyer, a child who given that he has spent the past few years in prison being tortured is unlikely to have completed primary school education (and who yet has read the novels of Turgenev) and is led to believe that he can go straight on to training as a medic, and to whom the banker proposes to give, directly, $12.5m at a meeting at which, as pre-arranged, this same money is handed over to the suspected terrorist financier Dr Abdullah. In this confusion, the American approach of arresting everybody has my sympathy. His age is something that would be easily ascertainable by any competent doctor or dentist (the physiological differences between an 11-13 year old and an 18-22 year old being sufficient to differentiate with confidence). But this is clearly not a novel about an 11 year old who looks, and behaves, as if he is 21. So Issa is a fraud, or deluded. But can a person in their early 20s honestly believe they were born only 13 or less years ago, unless they are mad, and how can their professional advisers, a lawyer and a banker, if honest, acquiesce in this? I read the whole book waiting for the penny to drop and for either Annabel or Tommy or the spooks to make the point that the story they have is obviously untrue but at the end, with the penny still undropped, we readers are left with the following options: • In addition to Stalin’s (1940s), and Yeltsin’s and Putin’s (1990s) brutal military invasions of Chechnya (making Issa either in his 60s, 11-13, or 8 or less) there was a brutal military invasion under Gorbachev (1980s) which we did not notice at the time or since; • The book is science fiction, set in the future, or Issa has a time machine, or it is set in an alternative reality in which Gorbachev did attack Chechnya in the 1980s; • Issa is a fraud, the obvious flaws in whose stories have amazingly gone unnoticed by professional bankers and lawyers, but who is now getting his come-uppance when he tries to divert $12.5m to his preferred causes. In any of these cases, can we feel the moral indignation evident in other reviews? I’ll happily be indignant about Gorbachev’s invasion of Chechnya if I ever get evidence that such a thing ever happened at all. Equally I will not be indignant about hypothetical future or alternative reality events, only about things that actually happened, any more than I’d get all indignant about Sauron’s invasion of Gondor. The alternative is a failed fraud where the most the author can reasonably expect from us in the way of sympathy (but not moral indignation) for his hero is – “nice try… pity you didn’t get to nick the money… ouch.”

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