The Night Manager

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John le Carré began looking for a new emphasis for his espionage fiction in his previous two novels, The Russia House (1989) and The Secret Pilgrim (1991). The Night Manager, his thirteenth novel, looks beyond the end of the Cold War to the burgeoning business of illegal anus dealing. Le Carre’ vividly depicts an intelligence establishment bored by the mundane post-Cold War world and confused by the murky morality of contemporary geopolitics.

The Night Manager tells two parallel stories. One deals with the exploits of Jonathan Pine, soldier turned hotelier turned spy, and his struggles to understand his contradictory, potentially self-destructive nature. The other recalls the complexity of the George Smiley novels, particularly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), in examining the political and bureaucratic infighting among various elements of British and American intelligence. The two stories converge in a series of betrayals.

While working in the Queen Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo, Jonathan Pine meets Sophie, a mysterious Egyptian, when she asks him discreetly to photocopy some incriminating documents stolen from her lover, Freddie Hamid, a sleazy playboy and co-owner of Jonathan’s hotel. Although he promises not to, he makes additional copies and patriotically turns them over to British intelligence. Soon after Jonathan and Sophie become lovers, she is brutally murdered. Jonathan retreats from the pain of his guilt to the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich, where suddenly appears Richard Onslow Roper, the international arms dealer Jonathan knows to be responsible for Sophie’s death, since the stolen documents related to his dealings with Hamid. Seeing Jed, Roper’s mistress, Jonathan begins falling in love again despite himself.

The orphaned son of an army sergeant and a German mother, Jonathan had left the army after killing terrorists during a top- secret operation in Northern Ireland. Seeing Roper reminds him of the impossibility of fleeing the consequences of his actions, and he volunteers to work with British intelligence to entrap the arms dealer. Leonard Burr oversees the operation known as Limpet, aimed at convincing Roper and his cohorts that the hotelier is a fellow criminal so that he can infiltrate their operation.

After escapades in Cornwall and Quebec, Jonathan lands at Hunter’s Island in the Caribbean, posing as a cook. Rescuing Roper’s son, Daniel, during a staged kidnap-ping, Jonathan is severely beaten by one of the supposed kidnappers. Roper takes him to his home on a nearby island so that he can be nursed back to health. In the Roper enclave, Jonathan is unable to escape the suspicions of Corkoran, Roper’s vicious, jealous henchman. Matters are complicated by Jonathan’s dangerous affair with Jed and Corkoran’s awareness of it.

Using extraordinary ingenuity, Jonathan sends the British proof of Roper’s inroads into the international business establishment and details about major shipments of arms and drugs. After Burr’s enemies in British intelligence betray Jonathan, Burr must choose between capturing Roper and saving his agent.

The Night Manager revolves around a series of betrayals. Sophie betrays Freddie because her moral sense is outraged by his greedy involvement in arms smuggling. Why Jonathan betrays her is less clear. His only explanation to himself is one of misguided patriotism: “I was One of Us-Us being Englishmen of self-evident loyalty and discretion. Us being Good Chaps.” As an outsider to a world of privilege he secretly admires, Jonathan both longs to fit in and defiantly states his class consciousness. When Sophie asks if he was at schOOl with a British acquaintance, Jonathan replies, “I wasn’t at that kind of school.” Part of his motivation for revenge against Roper is that his adversary, like Freddie, has resorted to crime despite coming...

(This entire section contains 1875 words.)

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from a world of privilege.

Jonathan betrays Sophie before falling in love with her, but his guilt is compounded by his failure to tell her of his love, creating a nagging sense of incompleteness: “Look at himself how he might, he saw nothing but half-measures, failures and undignified withdrawals, and Sophie was the monument to all of them.” These failures include a marriage during which his inadequacies made his wife suspect him of homosexual leanings. He denies himself passion until Sophie, only to see her murdered because of him; he gets a second chance with Jed, only to create circumstances that will destroy them both.

Inspecting the books in Jonathan’s Zurich apartment, Burr notices works by Thomas Hardy and one about T. E. Lawrence that belonged to Jonathan’s father. These two figures represent at least part of Jonathan’s dichotomy: the fatalistic pessimism of Hardy and the romantic fatalism of Lawrence. Through Jonathan, le Carre examines the conflicting views of the world that can propel an individual into either action or ennui. The result is an often passive hero who displays extreme patience in going through all the deceptions leading to Roper’s lair and in waiting for the opportunity to find the information Burr needs. Jonathan takes chances not out of a sense of patriotism or a romantic quest for adventure but to make penance for his sins. Through it all runs an almost suicidal impulse that makes him confide some of his secrets to Jed and to a Quebec woman who is also briefly his lover. Exploiting the latter to earn a passport allows Jonathan to experience a “self- distaste” he almost seems to enjoy.

Le Carre’ calls attention to Jonathan’s romantic fatalism by describing him as “the more-than-good soldier,” referring to the suicidal title character in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). This same impulse provokes him during the staged kidnap-ping of Daniel Roper. When Daniel sobs, he reacts out of sympathy but also out of pity for the lonely boy he once was.

Jonathan is a natural spy because of his talent for role- playing that results from his sense of incompleteness: “You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself” He gives himself over to the roles he plays so completely that in pretending to be Roper’s friend he finds himself attracted to his adversary. When Roper gives him a new false passport, Jonathan’s “eyes blurred, a lump formed in his throat. Roper protects me. Roper is my friend.” Because they share Jed, though without Roper’s knowledge, Jonathan feels another bond.

Le Carre’s presentation of his protagonists is clearly influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Jonathan is both a passive, idealistic observer like Nick Carraway and a naive romantic like Jay Gatsby. Roper is both the cruel, bigoted Tom Buchanan and the glamorous, charismatic Gatsby. Jed is Daisy Buchanan in reverse. While the shallow Daisy seems to offer more than she is capable of, Jed is less superficial than she appears, providing Jonathan some of the support he desperately needs.

While Roper seems attractive to Jed and Jonathan, Sophie sees beneath the brilliant surface: “He is at ease with the world. He is amusing. Confident. Yet he destroys it. What is missing in him?” Missing in this degenerate Gatsby is a moral sense. Corkoran compares him directly to Gatsby, calling him “a fully paid-up, unredeemable romantic. Roper believes in the light at the end of the pier.” Gatsby’s light represents his romantic conception of an idealized woman as well as his belief in his ability to transform himself to fit his dream. Roper’s light is his swashbuckling image of himself as one entitled to the earth’s spoils no matter how many suffer to serve his ego.

Roper constantly expounds upon his self-serving philosophy that justifies arms dealing: “World’s run by fear…. Can’t sell pipe dreams, can’t rule with charity, no good at all. Not in the real world.” He resorts to survival-of- the-fittest cliche-s: “If your tribe hasn’t got the guts to help itself, the sooner it’s culled the better!” Roper admires the free-enterprise-worshiping Americans for not hesitating to take commercial ad-vantage of military tensions and condemns the English as a nation of “tight-arsed vicars braying from the pulpit every Sunday, old nellies’ tea parties.” He sneers at those who neglect to take advantage of the world’s weaknesses: “Other chaps lie, dither, cheat, fiddle their expenses, crawl around. We do-and to hell with it!” Just as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby embodies the optimism of a simpler age, le Carre’s Roper personifies the materialism of a more cynical time.

Once Jonathan enters the Roper compound, le Carre’ pays increasing attention to the power struggle between the elements of British intelligence known as Enforcement and Pure Intelligence, with various levels of American spies caught up in the infighting. Pure Intelligence argues that Roper is of more benefit at large, since his conspirators and their conspirators can be identified. Presided over by the ominously named Geoffrey Darker, Pure Intelligence has complicated additional motives for seeing Roper on the loose; to protect its interests it spies on Rex Goodhew, a Whitehall bureaucrat who oversees Burr’s operation, even threatening his life. Burr suspects that Roper is allowed to sell arms to whatever side wants them as long as the weapons are made in Great Britain. Barbara Vandon, the Central Intelligence Agency’s London station chief, warns Rex Goodhew that Limpet is a dangerous operation because the American and British agents involved have no concept of “geopolitics.” Those in charge of spying seem more concerned with protecting their careers than with rounding up illegal arms salesmen and international drug smugglers.

Throughout The Night Manager, le Carre criticizes certain deficiencies of British intelligence. There is the ridiculous schoolboy code of resenting an informer as a “snitch” and telling others of his identity, not realizing that such is another form of snitching. Because he plays by the rules, Goodhew refuses to believe that Pure Intelligence would deliberately endanger Jonathan. He is outraged that Darker refuses to explain why Limpet must be taken away from Enforcement because Pure Intelligence is too powerful to have to explain itself to anyone. It runs itself without regard to the elected and appointed officials who are supposed to oversee it.

This bureaucratic infighting provides the greatest drama in The Night Manager. One of the novel’s weaknesses is that Jonathan is an original, engrossing character until he is taken in by Roper. After that point le Carre’ declines to let him evolve further and finds too little for him to do. A lesser problem is the lack of clear resolution to the Jonathan- Roper conflict, with le Carre’ apparently planning to continue their stories. The most effective elements of The Night Manager are using Roper to embody the evil supposedly civilized people are capable of with Jonathan representing the potential courage in the ordinary person and throwing these characters against a background of political machinations that seemingly disregard good and evil as worn-out concepts.