Book review: Agent Running in the Field, by John Le Carré

John Le Carré’s new novel begins with a game of badminton, and ends with the sentence, “I had wanted to tell him I was a decent man, but it was too late.” Nevertheless that’s what he is. Nat, the narrator, is a not quite 50, not quite on the shelf officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, and he is challenged to the game by a young man, Ed, who approaches him in the athletics club. They are well-matched and soon play regularly. Ed, who says somewhat vaguely that he works in research, is a gauche young man. He is an idealist, passionately pro-European, a Germanophile, a loather of Brexit and of Donald Trump. He is also an innocent, but innocents live dangerously in Le Carré’s world.