Absolute Blank
A cruel God, one that brings people into existence only to pit them against each other to
make a point, animates the world of Absolute Friends. By the end of the
narrative, one has the impression of having watched a rousing round of the old board
game Risk. The characters might as well have been plastic Roman numerals, shifting
around and regrouping depending on rolls of the dice.
If John Le Carrè's intention was to foment outrage against the Bush administration's
foreign policy choices (you're preaching to the choir, buddy), it would have been easier
to succeed while using a cast of fully nuanced, complicated people. Because the
characters are not carefully drawn, and the subject matter is so political and current, the
overall impression is one of an unrefined, rushed book, written in a fit of rage.
Ted Mundy — any similarity to serial killer Ted Bundy is unsubstantiated and totally
confusing — is the protagonist, and the person with whom one should place one's
sympathies. Although he is English, he has a rootless background. His father served in
the military, so he spent his childhood in India. In his youth, he lived for some time in
Berlin, where he fell in with some socialist activists and met Sasha, a "limping,
charismatic firebrand" of a Socialist dissident.
Sasha, who is crippled, is supposed to be a simultaneously pathetic and compelling
figure, but the description of his speeches makes him into a caricature. In one, "he has
accused the morally degenerate American lackeys of the so-called government in Bonn of
sanitizing Germany's Nazi past with consumerism, and turning the Auschwitz generation
into a flock of fat sheep with nothing in their heads but new refrigerators, TV sets and
Mercedes cars." We don't know whether to believe in him or laugh at him.
The German authorities throw Mundy out of Germany after he saves Sasha from police
during a riot. Mundy re-creates himself in England, working for the tourism bureau and
marrying a defiantly ordinary woman with bourgeois values, Sasha contacts him. He is
working with British intelligence and wants Mundy to help him. Mundy carries packages
in and out of Germany to his double agent friend. The secrecy and poverty of the spy life
wrecks his marriage.
The crucial events of the book lie not in the past of the two friends, but in the present,
which is understood to be a time after September 11 and after the end of the second Gulf
War. Mundy and Sasha are middle-aged. Mundy is no longer in the spying business. He
lives in Germany, leads tours of one of King Ludwig's castles, and has just fallen in love
with a Turkish woman named Zara. For the first time in his life, he may really be happy,
despite the fact that he is the Iraq war's "unabashed opponent" and feels a crushing sense
of misery when he thinks of the state of the world. (Welcome to the club.)
Too bad, then, that Sasha contacts him again, with the idea of involving him in a scheme
financed by some mysterious millionaire for a "Counter-University" that would be a
"corporation-free academic zone." It's all a setup. Orville J. Rourke, an American spy
who was friendly with Mundy in the beginning of his espionage career, resurfaces,
having orchestrated the plot that has trapped Sasha and Mundy. With small warning to
the reader, the two friends are literally destroyed, sacrificed at the altar of the self-interest
of the United States of America.
There's more than an echo of The Quiet American in here -- Greene's novel and
Le Carrè's book both feature deceptively friendly American citizens who turn cold while
exercising their power. But Greene's book ends with a somewhat redemptive feeling; the
has-been British journalist and protagonist brings about the death of the American begins
to expose American machinations in Vietnam, and the abuse of power does not go
unpunished or unsolved. Not so in Absolute Friends.
To be fair, Le Carrè does try to create interest in Mundy by musing on his split
personality, the product of spying ("Who is Mundy Three, when Mundys One and Two
have gone to bed? Who is this third person who is neither of the other two, who lies
awake while they sleep, and listens for the chimes of country bells he doesn't hear?").
But the effort is always muddled and confused. At the end of the book, when the central
characters reach their narrative destinations, you're kind of relieved you don't have to see
a character you actually like meet an unpleasant fate. Thank heavens for small blessings.
— 24 February 2004
