Review: Agent Running In The Field
By John Le Carré | Viking
281 pages – $29
Langan’s Book Mark: 4/4 stars
In spy craft ‘agent running in the field’ is the job of an experienced, mid-level type whose skills and allegiances – or lack of the latter – don’t enable him to go higher in the service. This is the cloud that hangs over Nat’s professional life that he is trying to ignore at the beginning of John Le Carré’s new novel.
Nat is a forty-seven-year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. He knows that after twenty-five years running agents his time has passed. He can be argumentative and disdain authority. In the trade he is known as ‘glib under pressure, latent aggression good’; not good enough though to go higher. Nat is thinking about taking one more home assignment after working throughout Europe.