The Lawyer’s Scarf, the Banker’s Waning Testosterone : A Most Wanted Man and the Post-9/11 Politics of Emotion

Though often pigeonholed as a spy novel, John le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man (2008) provides an insight into the post-9/11 intellectual climate. As if to confirm the author’s place on the political spectrum, the novel unequivocally condemns ‘American justice’ that condones the indefinite detention of Muslims of the ‘suspect’ categories and Britain’s role in creating the political chaos in Chechnya. While reviewers praise it as ‘one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror’, critics detect le Carre’s inability to imagine Islam beyond the Western conceptions—Muslims as meek victims, yet staunch misogynists. The absence of a Muslim perspective, however, does not really discredit this novel as an important post-9/11 text. With le Carre’s almost exclusive focus on Western characters, A Most Wanted Man manages to hold up the mirror, cracked as it may be, to the emotional life of the guilt-ridden, educated Western middle class during this time of disruption. Interestingly, the novel ends with Tommy Brue, a middle-aged Scottish banker, putting his arm round the shoulders of a young German lawyer named Annabel Richter. At one level, it signals the defeat of their brands of liberal humanism and left-liberalism as the by-products of guilt, shame and love. Annabel’s idealism does not really save Issa Karpov, the eponymous Chechen refugee, any more than her headscarf, an ostensible sign of her respect for his culture. The story of Brue’s emotional attachment to this young woman comes close to a sentimental scenario of a father’s reconciliation with his daughter. At another level, however, the novel underlines the significance of such personal feelings that at once bind us to moral imperatives and create meaningful connectedness during divisive times.