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Sunday 12 April 2020

The Start of the Story: John Le Carre's The Night Manager

One of the best distractions from the terrors of my own to-read shelf is the bookshelves in the living room that contain my dad's books. There are obscure trashy fantasy novels alongside ponderous histories of Venice and the Silk Road, and there are Italian literary masterpieces alongside British mystery novels from the early twentieth century.

And then there are all the John Le Carré novels my dad has collected over the decades. Last year, on a whim, I picked up the Night Manager, because I'd seen the first episode (or two, I can't remember now) of the TV show when it came out in 2015 or so. I remembered the mood and the visuals, and how menacingly well-cast Hugh Laurie was as Richard Roper, the worst man in the world.

And now that I've gone back and watched the show, I wanted to look at the start of the novel and see if there were any lessons to take away from it - overall it's not my favorite of his books, but that initial section covers a lot of sins. And the story is probably more relevant now than when he published it, back in 1993, since we're a lot more conscious of the Faustian bargains governments make with the super-rich of various countries.

Where the show starts in Cairo, taking good advantage of the atmosphere of the Arab Spring to set the table for the meeting between Roper and Jonathan Pine in Switzerland years later, the book starts on that night in Switzerland. And where the show demonstrates what a consummate professional Jonathan is by having him calmly tell a guest during gunfire that the drinks in the hotel bar are free, the opening scene in Switzerland demonstrates that by describing how he's turned out in ways designed to appeal to the richer clients.

Coming back to my last post on "world-building", way back in 2015 when I had just re-read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, then I marveled at how Simmons packed all his themes into the first paragraph, and then played them out over the course of four books. Here Le Carré presents a different trick, of drawing in great detail the world that Jonathan lives in at the start of the story.

Meister's Hotel in Zurich is a world unto itself, after the fashion of the great old establishments of Europe. It's populated by the eccentrics that always populate Le Carré's books, such as Herr Kaspar, the concierge whose toupee was his stand of dignity against an overbearing client; or Frau Loring, who "had been Herr Meister's nanny, and as rumor had it, Herr Meister's father's mistress". It's also a building with its own stories to tell, like the grill room that Herr Meister has got it into his head to build, surpassing the understanding of the rest of the staff.

Because Jonathan is the night manager, per the title, the prose reflects the silence of his life at Meister's, and that in turn reflects the sense of a man hiding from life. To underscore the point, one of the letters he reads while waiting for Roper's party to arrive is from a guest with whom he had some form of potentially romantic relationship, but to whom he was emotionally distant. And to underscore that silence, and that feeling of being cut off, Roper arrives during the middle of a snowstorm, an apparition materializing from the outside world wreathed in quiet white.

And then Roper enters, and the story begins. The story, in this case, being the arrogance of the moneyed classes, the way they live a life apart from everyone else and the way that nothing - not bad weather, nor being out of the lobster salad - impinges on them getting what they want. Not even laws against selling arms to terrorists and mercenaries.

In a way the show is more successful than the book at depicting this. That might be because the flavor of rich bastard is more recognizable (Roper is first seen giving what looks like a TED or Davos talk on Youtube), and because the show takes place against the backdrop of Tahrir Square. And also it's the advantage that visual media have over prose, which has to spend a lot of words explaining and describing and suggesting all of the things that TV just shows you in a single frame.

That's not to say the book is bad. It suffers from a hundred-page stretch that the show dispenses with in about 15 minutes, but both do a good job of showing the corrupting influence of money, and how in the post-Soviet world capitalism became amoral. We live in a world where, instead of having to burnish your reputation the way the robber barons of the 1800s did, just the act of having money makes you Someone. This is down to the official bodyguards and the artfully ruffled but still upper-class younger girlfriend.

And it's not even about a clash between old money and nouveau riche, though Roper himself is proud of having come from humbler circumstances. Rather, his entry at Meister's shows the unthinking disruption that Roper's class inflicts - doesn't matter if we arrive in a snowstorm, the chasseurs will still be there to roll out the red carpet, because the old guard has lost its money and power, and can't exclude people like Roper anymore.

The book addresses Jonathan's past in Cairo much more openly than the show. In the show, he leaves his time in Cairo out of his CV, which makes him better able to disguise who he is. In the book, he tells Roper straight away that his previous job was in Cairo, but in the end it doesn't matter, because Roper's not the sort to remember the night manager in a hotel where he had a woman murdered for sharing out his arms deals.

Again, The Night Manager doesn't pack all its themes into its first paragraph the way Hyperion does. There's a reference to the Gulf War, which had just started, and the repercussions it has on both the stock market and the bookings at Meister's could signal the shockwaves that Roper's arrival has on Jonathan's somnolent life in Switzerland. But I see the section at Meister's more as Le Carré setting the table, showing us the rules of the world Jonathan has lived in as an employee of the better hotels, before plunging him, and us, into the far murkier world of arms deals and illicit sanction given thereto by governments in the name of catching "bigger fish".

You could argue that the fall of the USSR deprived thriller writers like John Le Carré of their subject matter. James Bond, for one, was never the same after 1991. The Night Manager was his first novel after that, and it's fair to say that it was the first sign of the direction he would take for the next few books, more enraged at the misdeeds of the moneyed classes than worked up by the Cold War.

What makes it impressive, if disheartening, is the way that message resonates even louder today than it did then, when the West was still basking in the glory of its victory over communism.

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