John le Carré’s Scathing Tale of Brexit Britain
If in John le Carré’s novels the British intelligence service stands as a microcosm for the state of the nation itself, then bad news: In 2019, we’re looking less at a major global power than at a leaky, pusillanimous, perennially cash-strapped institution. An agent’s best transport option for a clandestine mission is a rented “clapped-out Vauxhall.” There’s a bureaucratic ban on bottled water. Nat, the narrator of Agent Running in the Field, le Carré’s latest, is chided by his superiors when he expenses a taxi to interview a former source at a Czech resort town popular among Russian organized criminals. “It seems,” Nat observes dryly, “there was a bus I could have taken.”
is a master spy novelist’s attempt to capture Brexit Britain in all its dysfunction and ignominy. Nat is
