A friend’s recent Facebook post charmingly insinuated that Thomas Jefferson’s love of books and reading could, in part, be attributed to the absence then of the Internet and other electronic distractions that plague us in our time.
Later the same afternoon, while at the local library to pick up some movie DVDs (not a fan of streaming) for the weekend, I casually walked through the reimagined book section and happened to discover the new large print section, a sight for my sore eyes. One book jumped at me – Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré – and my thoughts flew back to my university days when I had discovered the joy of books and become a voracious reader and a daily visitor at the local library.
Le Carré was one of the authors whose books (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, The Looking Glass War, etc.) I had enjoyed reading. But it had been at least fifteen years since I had read a paper book and, although my tablet is chock full of books in electronic format, I had done no serious, immersed reading in recent days as I had done four decades ago. (It is funny how memories come rushing back. The last book I read in one sitting – or rather one lying down – fifteen years ago was Edna O’Brien’s The Lonely Girl.)
Anyway, to get back to le Carré, I wasn’t at all certain if I would read this book in full or just skim through the pages and get it back to the library before the due date. That is another thing about me and libraries. I have never made a late return and, hence, never paid a fine.
I woke up the next morning and, would you believe it, there was no Internet! After several frantic phone calls, it became clear that a replacement modem would be delivered and installed only the following morning, a full thirty-six hours later. To top it all, for some unknown reason, the data mode on my phone also did not work.
So, there I was, quite unexpectedly, in the same boat as Jefferson – no Internet, no Google, no Facebook, no Instagram – in short no distractions at all.
I picked up Agent Running in the Field and began to read. All credit to the author, I finished it almost in one go, save the last denouement chapter that I kept to savor the next morning.
Did my burying myself in the book have anything to do with the lack of Internet connectivity? I think very little. After the first ten pages, the book took me back in time to the pleasure of reading. In style the book carries the imprint of his earlier books and in content there is Brexit, Trump, Putin, NATO, and, believe it or not, Ukraine!
It was good to learn that le Carré shared my views on the Armenian genocide (‘Had Turkey apologized for slaughtering the Armenian and Kurds?’) and my distaste for Azerbaijan (‘The Azerbaijani Mafia who built the place out of the profits of human trafficking.’) And an insight into the string pulling behind world turmoil (‘The expertise of the Baroness and her brother is the sovereign state of Ukraine.’) The pan European Le Carré, not surprisingly, detested Brexit with nothing less than absolute contempt.
His attributed opinions of Trump (‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself.’) and Putin (‘Thanks to Putin and his gang of unredeemed Stalinists, Russia was not going forward to a bright future, but backwards into her dark, delusional past.’) were, to say the least, shockingly extreme.
Le Carré also had a comment on an Indian cricketer (‘The tortuous bowling action of India’s spin bowler Kuldeep Yadav.’) whose name I had not heard of before, having given cricket up since moving to baseball-land.
Thanks to the Internet, I learned that Le Carré’s real name was David John Moore Cornwell, and that the pseudonym “le Carré” meant the “the square.”
John le Carré, I found out, had passed away on the 12th December, 2020. In the midst of all the Covid headlines, he slipped away unheralded, much like the protagonists of his novels of espionage.
Abie Alexander
Greenbelt, Maryland
© August 02, 2022