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The Mission Song
by John le Carre
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Staff Pick
The Mission Song contains all the complexity and conspiracy of a great John le Carré novel, this time with an unusually young and witty narrator, interpreter Bruno Salvo; half-Congolese and well and truly in over his head. Le Carré's take on the blighted and abused African nation of Congo displays compassion as well as despair while his narrative is utterly compelling. A sparkling and intelligent novel from the inimitable (though many try) le Carré.
Recommended by Georgie, Powells.com
"Even in his mid-seventies, Le Carré is still a master of cloak and dagger....And he is deeply attuned to the billions of ways in which Africa is well and truly fucked. What he lacks in The Mission Song, however, is a narrator who can tell his story with the gravitas it deserves. For a novel with so much to say — including some trenchant things about the West's cynical manipulation of Africa — it's a shame that much of it gets lost in translation." Ben Hughes, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopses & Reviews Abandoned by both his Irish father and Congolese mother, Bruno Salvador has long looked for someone to guide his life. He has found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence.
Bruno's African upbringing, and fluency in numerous African languages, has made him a top interpreter in London, useful to businesses, hospitals, diplomats — and spies. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility known as the "Chat Room," Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, snatched voice mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference between Central African warlords, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain bring peace to a bloody corner of the world. But then he hears something he should not have...
Building upon the box office success of le Carré's The Constant Gardener (like The Mission Song, built around turmoil and conspiracy in Africa) and le Carré's laser eye for the complexity of the modern world (seen in Absolute Friends' prediction that the Iraq war would be based on phony and manipulated intelligence), this new novel is a crowning achievement, full of politics, heart, and the sort of suspense that nobody in the world does better. Review: "Bestseller le Carré ( The Constant Gardener) brings a light touch to his 20th novel, the engrossing tale of an idealistic and nave British interpreter, Bruno 'Salvo' Salvador. The 29-year-old Congo native's mixed parentage puts him in a tentative position in society, despite his being married to an attractive upper-class white Englishwoman, who's a celebrity journalist. Salvo's genius with languages has led to steady work from a variety of employers, including covert assignments from shadowy government entities. One such job enmeshes the interpreter in an ambitious scheme to finally bring stability to the much victimized Congo, and Salvo's personal stake in the outcome tests his professionalism and ethics. Amid the bursts of humor, le Carré convincingly conveys his empathy for the African nation and his cynicism at its would-be saviors, both home-grown patriots and global powers seeking to impose democracy on a failed state. Especially impressive is the character of Salvo, who's a far cry from the author's typical protagonist but is just as plausible. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "I don't know what accounts for the longevity of so many contemporary American and European writers, in terms of both lifespans and productivity. Not too long ago, short lives were common in the literary world. Today, the likes of Saul Bellow, pounding the keys almost to the moment of his death at 89, or Philip Roth, who arguably has done his best work after becoming eligible for Medicare, or Gunter ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Grass, making headlines with his new memoir at 78, are the rule. I am reminded of a comment Thomas McGuane made a few years ago: With so many authors living so long, a writer nowadays can remain a young writer well into middle age. Sixty is the new 40. Now comes 'The Mission Song,' the 20th novel by Britain's John le Carre, who turns 75 this year and shows no signs of fatigue. His prose is as lovely and expressive as ever; his ear for dialogue remains wonderfully acute. Each of the characters in 'The Mission Song' speaks with a distinctive voice, so that the usual interjections of 'so-and-so said' seem almost superfluous. An ear for speech is the genius of le Carre's protagonist, Bruno Salvador, an interpreter fluent in English, French, Swahili and several other African languages such as Kinyarwanda (the native tongue of Rwanda) and Shi (spoken in the eastern Congo). Salvo, as he's known to his friends (some of whom later become his enemies), came to this linguistic mastery early in life. Born in the eastern Congo, the orphaned love-child of an Irish Catholic missionary priest and a Congolese woman whom he never knew, he attended a secret school where the sons of errant priests were sent for higher education. There, his mentor and erstwhile lover, Brother Michael, inspired him to train as a professional interpreter in the tribal languages he'd absorbed from childhood. Eventually, he arrived in England and gained British citizenship. The mixed-race foreigner furthered his integration into British society by marrying a white celebrity journalist, Penelope. The marriage has gone sour when the novel opens, and Salvo enters into an adulterous affair with Hannah, a Congolese nurse at a London Hospital. The love story, deftly handled, serves as a subplot to an intricate thriller. Salvo is a star in his unusual profession and vain about his abilities. He relishes the fact that he is 'the one person in the room nobody can do without.' Early in the story, which he narrates, he tells us that there is a world of difference between a mere translator, who can get by with mediocre language skills and a good dictionary, and a top interpreter. Hired by large corporations, law firms and hospitals, he also works part-time for the British Secret Service in a London basement known as 'The Chat Room.' It looks like a boiler-room operation, but those people in cubicles wearing headsets are interpreters eavesdropping on sensitive telephone conversations all over the world. In establishing his main character's backstory, le Carre's pacing is neither overly leisured nor mechanically efficient. The tale gets moving when the Chat Room supervisor assigns Salvo to act as a simultaneous translator at a hush-hush meeting between Congolese warlords and a shadowy syndicate of Western financiers. As naive as he is vain, ardent to serve queen and country, Salvo accepts. From then on, with the hooked reader in tow, he plunges into familiar le Carre territory, a world of conspiracies, treachery and deceit. For all that, 'The Mission Song' has a comic, light-hearted touch. At the same time, it has the moral seriousness of le Carre's other novel of Africa, 'The Constant Gardener.' As in that tale about the machinations of big pharmaceutical companies in Kenya, the villain here is a multinational corporation. Indeed, with the extinction of the Soviet Union, global capitalism seems to be fueling le Carre's literary energies. The chess matches between George Smiley, his Cold War spymaster, and Smiley's Soviet adversary, Karla, have been replaced by confused, asymmetrical warfare between somewhat hapless individuals such as Justin Quayle, the British diplomat in 'The Constant Gardener,' and corporate giants that know no boundaries, moral or geographical. A less worldly writer, or one with more left-wing axes to grind, would be tempted to portray these global titans as the sole authors of Africa's endless tragedy. Le Carre avoids that trap and presents African autocrats for the corrupt kleptomaniacs many of them are. Salvo and Hannah excepted, nobody in this book has clean hands, but some hands are dirtier than others. Africa has become 'hot' in recent years, and I don't mean the climate. It's a must-stop on the itineraries of Western celebrities from Bono to Madonna to Bill Clinton. Plagued by AIDS and malaria, ruled by vicious tyrants, wracked by civil wars and genocide, it is the irresistible magnet for aid agencies and missionaries, for whom it remains the 'dark continent' in need of their salvation. It also remains what it's been since the colonial era: the place where foreign business interests (chiefly Western but increasingly Chinese as well) can make lots of money and extract natural resources. The Syndicate in 'The Mission Song' combines both the impulse to save and the urge to plunder. Salvo, his African conscience stirred through his affair with Hannah, suffers from a bit of savior complex himself. The Syndicate's purported mission — to democratize his native country while making it a safer place to do business, thus bringing freedom and prosperity to all — sings its siren song to him. None of the action takes place in Africa. The setting is confined to London and a nameless island in the British channel. There, the Syndicate's representatives confer with two warlords and the son of a rich Congolese entrepreneur, Honore Amour-Joyeuse, who goes by the nickname of Haj. The purpose of this exercise is to get the Africans to sign a contract pledging support to the Syndicate's scheme, its centerpiece being the installation in the eastern Congo of a government led by an aging, charismatic messiah called the Mwangaza. Granted exclusive rights to the region's vital minerals, the Syndicate will ensure that its profits are equitably distributed to the people. If this sounds fishy to you, it should, and therein lies the novel's only major flaw. The key that winds the spring that drives the story is Salvo's naivete. Le Carre skillfully draws an idealistic character less than half his age, but the reader may find, as I did, Salvo's gullibility difficult to accept. Almost from the moment he's given the mission, you sense that something is dreadfully wrong and wonder why Salvo doesn't, too. Consequently, his awakening, when in the course of his interpretive work he hears things not intended for his ears, seems a bit contrived, his disillusionment a little too predictable. Things don't end well for Salvo either, and I was left with the feeling that he allowed himself to be bamboozled. Nevertheless, the vividness of le Carre's characterizations — Haj is marvelous and almost upstages Salvo — and his adroit navigation of a plot with more twists and turns than the mountain segment of the Tour de France compensate for this shortcoming. 'The Mission Song' is a minor work compared with le Carre's big Cold War novels, but his skepticism, compassion and sense of moral outrage are as much in evidence here as in 'A Perfect Spy' or 'The Honorable Schoolboy.' To categorize him, as many do, as a 'spy' novelist is to do him a disservice; he uses the world of cloak-and-dagger much as Conrad used the sea — to explore the dark places in human nature. Philip Caputo is the author of, most recently, 'Acts of Faith.'" Reviewed by Philip Caputo, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Metaphors abound, both in deeds and words, and le Carré maintains a tight, three-act plot....Another fine work of intrigue from a skilled interpreter of all things topical." Kirkus Reviews Review: "The start is slow and the middle mind-boggling, but pay attention and you'll pick up le Carré's ingenious tune. (Grade: B+)" Entertainment Weekly Review: "The opening half of this novel is a bit static — the dynamics of multilingual interpretation are difficult to convey in print — but the power of the human drama takes hold toward the end." Booklist Review: "[A] marvelous return to the John le Carré of old, with all the captivating characters, finely rendered landscapes and messy complexities that have always powered his best work." San Francisco Chronicle Review: "[I]t is good to see le Carré, at 74, moving briskly again, trying on irony for size and permitting the pain his hero and heroine suffer to be lightly measured instead of heavily tragic." Los Angeles Times Review: "The Mission Song is the riveting work of a master." Denver Post Review: "At 74, le Carré is as astute as ever. This is his 20th novel, and his understanding of how the world ticks is, as always, machete sharp. It's all part of his brilliance as a writer and a thinker." USA Today Review: "As if to defy his critics, le Carré's latest novel...engages the complexity of contemporary international relations by focusing on the language that expresses it — the language of diplomatic obfuscation and corporate newspeak." New York Times Review: "[S]lightly sub-par le Carre still beats 95 percent of everything else in the field." Baltimore Sun Review: "It turns out that truth is better than fiction, but, when it comes to le Carré, fiction is always better written." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Synopsis: A naive young interpreter stumbles into the heart of an outrageous British plot in the astonishing new novel by the master of the literary thriller. About the Author John le Carré is the author of numerous classic, bestselling novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Little Drummer Girl, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures, including The Constant Gardener, The Tailor of Panama, and The Russia House. In the 1950s he worked for British Intelligence. He lives in Cornwall, England.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780316016742
- Author:
- le Carre, John
- Publisher:
- Little Brown and Company
- Author:
- Le Carre, John
- Subject:
- Espionage/Intrigue
- Subject:
- Thrillers
- Subject:
- World politics
- Subject:
- Intelligence officers
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Edition Number:
- 1st ed.
- Publication Date:
- September 19, 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 339
- Dimensions:
- 9.50x6.33x1.22 in. 1.25 lbs.
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