Paradoxical Polemics

Abstract

John le Carré is on a tear. Although his fiction prior to 9/11 is often peppered with barbs at the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States, his criticism since the terrorist attacks appears to have escalated into rage. His outbursts, however, do not target the perpetrators. Rather, his post-9/11 fiction worries more about America’s responses to and influence on British policies than the event and the losses occasioned by the attack itself or the motivations and responsibilities of the perpetrators. In an essay published originally in The Times of London, he declares, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War” (“The United States” 11). Just as US military and cultural responses to 9/11 have continued well past the attack’s tenth anniversary, so they still haunt the novels of John le Carré. His first fictional response, Absolute Friends (2003), expresses anger, not at the war cries of the terrorists, but at the lies that perpetrated the war in Iraq led by President George W. Bush and supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair. By 2008, when le Carré published A Most Wanted Man, the targets of his wrath expanded to include the ongoing wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, racial profiling, surveillance, and the US policy of extraordinary rendition, which sent suspects abroad to be subjected to draconian interrogation practices.