Premonition of War: Writer David Cornwell (writing under the name John le Carré) at his home in Hampstead, London, 1983. Perhaps the best evocation of the arms peddler is le Carré's The Night Manager.Photo: Jeff Wilkinson/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
Early in this millennium, speculation ran wild around the Nobel Prize in Literature. When will the next American writer win an award? Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy? Will an American writer ever win again?
In the end, the Americans won. But he was a lyricist, a singer-songwriter, someone only his true followers paid attention to and took to heart. Bob Dylan was chosen by an ultra-conservative organization as a surprising left-wing talent.
Dylan's 1960s “politics”, demonstrated in songs such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” gave the Nobel Academy a political cover to celebrate Americans. . A maelstrom of claims that his lyrics constituted Rimbaud-esque poetry gave them literary legitimacy.
When Dylan's acceptance speech was finally made public months later, rather than at the ceremony, which he did not attend, it seemed like the Academy had made a terrible mistake. A personal essay of the type often requested by creative writing students these days, it is a simple tour of Dylan's early reading, and it drew praise from Dylan, who cited Moby-Dick as a seminal work in literary education.
However, as a whole it lacks the literary acuity and depth characteristic of such speeches; J.M. Coetzee's speech, for example, was as much a quest for meaning as it was a story. Supporters of singer-songwriter, novelist and poet Leonard Cohen were, and continue to be, furious about Dylan's win.
But in the dark times we live in, revisiting Dylan's very early work reveals its timeless applicability. And while Dylan always refused to be pigeonholed as a protest poet working in the medium of folk music, his opposition to the status quo is still evident 60 years after those two songs.
As pressure mounts for an embargo on the supply and sale of arms to Israel, who is not moved by the opening line of Masters of War?
“Come on, masters of war / You who build big guns / You who build bombers / You who make all kinds of bombs / You who hide behind walls / You who hide behind desks / I give you I just want you to know / I can see through the mask.”
“You pull all the triggers/As others fire/And you sit and watch/As the death toll mounts/You hide in the mansion/The blood of young men/ Their While it flows from the body / and is buried in the mud.”
Also: “You have thrown into the world the worst fear that could ever be thrown into the world.”
Enablers of the genocide in Gaza range from nation-state-backed Daddy Warbucks arms dealers and weapons manufacturers to the nation-state itself, with Israel's largest supplier of jets and bombs It is the United States.
The Friends (colloquially known as Quakers) have published a valuable research document, “Israel Profiting from the 2023-2024 Attack on Gaza,” a product of its subsidiary, the Center for Corporate Responsibility and Action of the American Friends Service Committee. announced “Companies that are
The number of German weapons manufacturers is significant and plausibly explains the comprehensive support Germany has given Israel throughout its wars with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In “With God on My Side,'' Dylan expresses his bitter feelings about Germany. “World War II is over/We forgave the Germans and then we became friends/They killed six million people and fried them in the oven/Germans now” They too have God They will be on your side. ”
War creates a black market for all sorts of goods. In his own screenplay and subsequent novel The Third Man, Graham Greene tells the story of how the unscrupulous Harry Lime sold penicillin to treat children in Vienna after World War II. . Arms dealers are more suspicious and more deadly.
Perhaps the best evocation of the arms peddler is John le Carré's The Night Manager. As the novel's jacket acutely reminds us, “Beyond the shadowy depths of Whitehall and Washington, an unholy alliance is at work between the intelligence services and the clandestine arms trade.”
The manager of the same name is Jonathan Pine, for whom this job is an escape from his past and himself. What could be less taxing and threatening than working the night shift at a luxury hotel? But it turns out this isn't a scenario where there's nothing to see. Please continue.
There is much to note about Pine's intelligence and sensitivity. He is a typical le Carré character, principled but vulnerable, hurt by the world, trying to survive fine on the sidelines, but when asked a big question, he answers by denying his own conscience and morality. I can't leave it without it.
The story moves from West Cornwall to Quebec, parts of the world that the novelist le Carré loved, to the Caribbean and Panama, where it ends with another of le Carré's novels, The Tailor of Panama. ' is vividly evoked.
Like his immediate predecessors in espionage and thriller work, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming, le Carré excels at establishing a sense of place and time.
Like Greene, le Carré places his protagonists in situations of the most difficult moral complexity. Green's commitment to the ethics and humanity of his protagonist and other characters, whether it's the rebellious Catholic priest in The Power and the Glory or the title character in The Honorary Consul and The Quiet American. The demands are extreme and it's actually all about moral and ethical thrillers.
Pine, the night manager, also awakens from his existential and moral slumber to fight the terrible evil of the illegal arms trade and the man responsible for it, whom he considers to be the worst man in the world. I was excited for this.
The point I'd like to make here is that neither Greene nor le Carré inhabit the spy world of Fleming's James Bond. All three worked for British intelligence, Fleming in particular, but the characters and circumstances of their work were quite different.
In fact, Fleming's real contribution to the world was a brutal murderer with a very refined taste for champagne, vintage French wine, fast cars, Jermyn Street suits, cigars, and homemade cigarettes, a misogynist and self-deprecating man. It's not 007.
Rather, it is his remarkable intelligence work during World War II, some of which was so secret and extensive that it has only recently come to light.
le Carré wrote about his intuitions, doubting what he knew and what was happening in the real world.
Those hunches are further informed and expanded upon by research, careful conversations, and expert opinion (often legitimate!), so that geopolitics, realpolitik, and multinational corporations and Corporate intrigue (like the global pharmaceutical industry in The Constant Gardener) is reflected. real world.
During my long reading relationship with le Carré, there were often moments when I stopped reading with the thought, “How did he know that was going to happen?''
Published in 1995, Our Game is set in the then little-known republics of South Ossetia and North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. The troubles vividly described there have become reality.
Ian McEwan once described le Carré as “probably the most important British novelist of the second half of the 20th century''.
Like The Envoy to Our Game, his books are most penetrating because le Carré captures the human heart, condensed and understated yet full of emotion. .
“But now the chanting was too loud and I couldn't hear it even if I wanted to. For a while I stood alone, thinking of nothing, believing in nothing. I had no world to return to; There was no one left to escape except me. Next to me lay the Kalashnikov. I slung it over my shoulder and hurried down the slope after him.”
And in the concise sentence at the end of his penultimate novel, Agent Running in the Field, he writes, “From his first novel, Call of the Dead, to his last, Silverview,” he writes, It depicts the main dilemmas of le Carré's characters that run through The Spy. From “The Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “The Honorable Schoolboy,” “Smiley’s People,” and “The Perfect Spy”: “I told him I was a decent guy. I wanted to tell you, but it was already too late.”