Then came the now.
The best in the trade knew it was coming. In his last two novels, Agent Running in the Field and Silverview, old JLC himself seemed wracked by even more doubt than usual; in the former he even pointedly mentions Trump by name (and with utter disgust), something le Carré had rarely if ever done before with regard to contemporary heads of state. I’m almost glad the man didn’t survive to see our present moment.
Whatever moral consensus there was has been obliterated. Russia? The new Republican orthodoxy is more pro-Kremlin than the old CPUSA had ever been. And every other new law enacted in Moscow—like last week’s insane ban on “child-free propaganda,” as in: It is now literally illegal to post about not wanting children—-is a MAGA wet dream. There is, on almost any issue of substance, little daylight between the two.
Ukraine? What should be the most black-and-white war narrative in modern history (a smaller country valiantly fighting for self-determination against an almost baroquely inhumane aggressor) is anything but. Kremlin propaganda has successfully convinced millions of Americans that Ukrainians are “Nazis,” or a US client state. Up is down, down is up.
Allies in the Middle East? The heart breaks to even comment on this one. But it’s worth pointing out that, as we speak, Marvel is busy erasing a Mossad agent character from the upcoming Captain America movie. And, of course, the one area where both isolationist Trump supporters and young socialists with the Palestine flag in the bio can hold hands and sing in harmony is that both see the CIA as an enemy of the people.
Americans are openly living in a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller, where corruption goes all the way to the top—except that half of the US population seems to see this as a good thing, or at least a temporary cleansing necessity. You try writing grounded spy fiction in a reality where “the president is in on it” is not even a twist.
Even if one tried to take things down to the existential nuts and bolts—freedom versus tyranny—one would still be out of luck in a place where many think public health measures (and Black mermaids) are a form of tyranny, and banning books and rounding up immigrants is a form of freedom.
In short, we are in the middle of a complete ideological realignment that will, and probably should, bring forth a new new world order. A world of gray actors, impossible to describe in the easy East/West, communist/capitalist, democracy/tyranny binaries.
Which, in time, will bring forth a new kind of spy novel. A better kind, arguably—focused on individual characters and their unique inner worlds, not the clunky clash of state ideologies. You can see the outline of this future in books like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, or Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.
As for myself, I ended up setting The Collaborators in the summer of 2021, the last days of the old status quo. With the sequel I’m embarking on now, I will have no such luxury; I’ll tell you how it goes. I guess I could just make like the latest Mission: Impossible and have my characters fight evil AI. There’s always evil AI.
