John le Carré's Post-Cold War Fiction by Robert Lance Snyder (review)

Single-author studies are increasingly rare, especially when the subject is a writer of spy novels. Nonetheless, Robert Lance Snyder's analysis of John le Carré's late fiction usefully fills a scholarly gap and makes a convincing case that the field would benefit from more work on his subject. The title indicates that it is a detailed study rather than a survey or a revolutionary new theorization of the field, but this slim volume is an excellent complement to Snyder's more comprehensive The Art of Indirection in British Espionage Fiction (2011), in which the author analyzes the work of five additional spy novelists. Snyder primarily seeks to "give le Carré his due" by salvaging the novelist's reputation from being dismissively categorized as genre fiction (8). Snyder compellingly argues that le Carré has proven to be one of the sharpest chroniclers of the decline of the British Empire and an especially strong critic of Western governments' actions in the post-9/11 War on Terror. John Le Carré's Post-Cold War Fiction is thus a small but significant contribution to the fields of espionage scholarship and contemporary British literature, as well as a productive intervention in ongoing debates about the role of genre fiction in academic discourse.

In the introduction, Snyder makes clear that he does not apply one totalizing theoretical lens to his assessment of le Carré's late work. This strategy appropriately mirrors the book's thesis that le Carré can't be pigeonholed into one genre or narrative style. Although several scholars have commented on le Carré's more widely discussed Cold War fiction, Snyder's study of the novelist's recent output stands among only a few stray articles on the subject. Snyder thus maps out largely uncharted territory, mainly by putting the many reviewers of le Carré's novels in dialogue with existing academic theories rather than engaging specifically with other literary critics. Each chapter treats two novels with a different theoretical slant, moving chronologically through the author's ten post-Cold War novels published prior to Snyder's study. (Le Carré's 2017 A Legacy of Spies was announced and released after Snyder's book went to print, so readers will have to come to their own conclusions about how the return of George Smiley might enrich or complicate Snyder's argument.) Snyder presents a fresh narrative of le Carré's career, marking a "forensic shift" in "how a literary subgenre traditionally dependent on binary oppositions … morphs in response to the geopolitical phenomenon of transnationalism" in the hands of a masterful artist (6). If the introduction seems breathless in its defense of an author beleaguered by negative reviewers and academic condescension, Snyder corrects course in the body of his study, which does not shy away from critique of the novels.

Chapter 1 takes up The Night Manager (1993) and Our Game (1995), primarily through the lens of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. Snyder convincingly traces the different voices present in le Carré's novels, including the powerful "cadences of authorial outrage" that his omniscient narrator directs toward characters who communicate in "a welter of largely artificial ways of speaking" (27). This chapter lays a groundwork of evidence that le Carré's narrative plotting is more complex than critics generally recognize. The excellent close reading of a "hallucinatory (non)event" in Our Game is particularly convincing, demonstrating how le Carré's prose, far from straightforward, can lend itself to contradictory interpretations (38). Chapter 2 analyzes The Tailor of Panama (1996) and Single & Single (1999) in the context of President George Bush Sr.'s "New World Order" speech, arguing that at this point in his career le Carré started to create fictional worlds that highlighted the futility of his optimistic vision. Chapter 3 treats The Constant Gardener (2001) and Absolute Friends (2003), relying on a postcolonial lens to argue that both novels "explore in different ways the crippling consequences of Britain...