The Tailor of Panama Book Review +character List

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
Past John le Carre.
332 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

The British Ambassador is a twit. His armed forces attache is eager to trade arms for drug coin. Universal cupidity reigns, and lechery, likewise. The weather condition is sultry. We're in Panama City, somewhere in the specious present, waiting for the culvert to fall into the hands of the Panamanians in 1999 -- as the current treaty requires -- unless somebody does something about information technology. In fact a plot is afoot, nether British auspices, only obscurely and then, to go the canal treaty aborted. The political terrain, which is contoured exclusively by doctrineless greed, lacks sure standard features, such as any sort of political left, the local variety having been crushed past Manuel Noriega and its remnants vaporized during Operation Sunrise in 1989. We're in John le Carre's new earth -- the new earth of the Americas (''The Tailor of Panama is his first book to be prepare there), the new earth of the mail service-cold-war spy novel and a new world of literary course for him (satire). Be prepared for vicious novelty.

Text:

Here's as much of the story as information technology's fair to tell: Harry Pendel, forty, a not-so-humble tailor, a transplanted London Jew, is blackmailed and bribed into condign an informant for British intelligence, on the theory that his professional contacts as a custom tailor to the rich and powerful ought to provide valuable information. Code-named Buchan, Pendel becomes the sole source for the sort of information his local handler especially wants, as Pendel quickly understands.

What the originators of the canal plot fearfulness is that the Panamanians might cede de facto control of the facility to the Japanese or some other objectionable party. Their plan is to gull powerfully placed irredentist elements in the American military establishment into nullifying the treaty and replaying the invasion of 1989. To ignite such action, a scenario in which it would announced to the world that the Government of the twenty-four hours was bloodily repressing a mildly leftish, just essentially democratic and virtuous opposition, would have to be managed, and fast.

Pendel has little to work with. He invents. He sees that his inventions gladden his handler. He invents more. He revises the most innocent comments of his customers into alarming omens. With the help of Marta, his demi-mistress (their sexual relationship is restricted to episodes of petting), he invents a left. Marta is a onetime member of the pupil resistance to Noriega and she enriches the tailor's construct -- the Silent Opposition -- with the real names of ex-comrades however hanging around merely at present politically inert. (If this reminds you of Graham Greene'south ''Our Man in Havana,'' you're right: the writer acknowledges his debt to the book and its central trope of a fabulating operative.)

Equally Pendel'due south concoctions are put to increasingly tragic use, the two-tiered moral structure of the narrative shows clearly. On tiptop are the Machiavels, the conscious servants of immoral power, and they are witheringly portrayed. This is how Andy Osnard, Pendel'due south handler, the foulmouthed younger son in a played-out line of gentry, decides on a career in intelligence: ''He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf game course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away.'' On the bottom are the pawns in the canal plot. They collaborate and they practice evil, simply they practice so under compulsion or out of misplaced love or loyalty to particular friends or lovers. The divergence between the two groups is of import.

Point of view skips around in this book, but nosotros witness events mainly through the eyes of the Tailor of Panama. He is an absorbing creation: ''Harry Pendel rose with a sense of his own diversity stronger than whatsoever he had experienced in all his years of striving and imagining. He had never been so many people. Some were strangers to him, others warders or erstwhile lags known to him from previous convictions. But all were at his side, marching with him in the same direction, sharers of his grand vision.'' Nicely conveyed is the intoxication Pendel finds in unfettered lying. The tailor is the book'southward deepest character -- appalling, likable, then appalling once more.

Leftlessness, a world without lefts, was bound to be a trouble for the political novel and its robust shadow, the spy novel. From Conrad to le Carre, the left -- as looming threat or promise, as kingdom come, as utopia gone mad, as brutal imperium -- has provided the armature for the groovy entries in this stream of literary creation. Readers who were wondering what life in the afterleft might exist like for writers similar John le Carre at present accept their reply. What he has done is to venture fiercely into satire, producing a tour de force in which nearly every convention of the classic spy novel is violated. If the novel is, in its bones nature, biased toward optimistic outcomes, genre writing is even more inflexibly bound to the tendency. Call up of the absolute regularity with which galactic tyrants are overthrown, cattle barons defeated past sodbusters, Heathcliffs domesticated. Even in the virtually elevated, reflective and somber of the archetype spy novels (similar Mr. le Carre's own), where practiced and evil interpenetrate confoundingly, the underlying migrate is toward victory for the forces of light.

Not here. Hold your jiff for this ane. Here villains are rewarded and the innocent and the least villainous are cruelly punished. Beyond that, this spy novel has no genuine spies, no existent spying, no secrets. Over the main class of the activity, there is no interpersonal violence amidst the principals. Y'all may think the phrase ''nonviolent thriller'' is an oxymoron, but it isn't. It describes the book adequately.

There are weaknesses in ''The Tailor of Panama,'' some less important than others. Getting used to Mr. le Carre doing satire means getting used to sketchier description and scene setting. I found the American characters rather shakily delineated, which might be set down to Mr. le Carre's famous ambivalence toward Americanity. Here, for example, is Pendel'due south wife, an American raised in the Canal Zone, speaking: ''Harry,'' she says, ''I wish you lot to think about your family unit. I know of besides many cases, and so do you, where men of 40 take suffered heart attacks and other stress-related maladies. . . . If you are truly worried nigh the future and non only using it as a pretext, we accept the rice subcontract to autumn back on, and we would surely all prefer to alive in reduced circumstances practicing Christian forbearance than try to keep pace with your rich, immoral friends and have you die on us.'' This is off key.

Merely a more substantial defect for me lies in an attribute of the Pendel graphic symbol: here we have, however niggling Mr. le Carre intended it, still another literary avatar of Judas. Information technology's reasonable to make an expatriate British tailor a Jew, only does this Jew, for example, have to defame the only decent, ''saintly'' (Pendel's own term) political leader in Panama, and so go along to implicate his own wife's utterly innocent Christian study grouping to boot? (There's a hit Judas parallel I can't mention without giving too much away.)

The touches on Pendel'south background added to my unease over this connection. For case, Pendel'southward Uncle Benny, a specialist in insurance arson, survived under the Nazis by becoming a tailor to the high control of the Wehrmacht. As you read, the phrase ''rootless cosmopolitans'' scratches at the doors of your heed.

John le Carre's writerly skills are at work in ''The Tailor of Panama.'' The pace is nonstop, scenes are cleanly and economically written, and flashbacks are incorporated seamlessly into the narrative. The details of the tailor's craft are given entertainingly. And the conclusion, which should probably not come every bit a surprise, resoundingly does.

Historical accident has taken away this writer's great subject, the state of war of the pretty bad (the Due west) against the much worse (the East). That's over, and the upshot is . . . a corking question. Certain features of the surreal Politik of our time nowadays the artistic intelligence with an unusual degree of challenge, to use everybody'southward favorite discussion. At present, after this unexpected essay into extreme satire, this rude smash of dismay and disgust, John le Carre's readers will be eager to see if he can provide the graver pleasures he accustomed them to in his previous mode of work.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/bsp/20243.html

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