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.