And you thought the fragmentation of Yugoslavia was an unsettling, insane mess.
"Our Game," a timely thriller from John le Carre, takes the lid off the Russian-ruled Caucasus to show us that there's more than one stew boiling as a result of communism's fall."The Caucasus?" you say.
"The Caucasus is the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov in the west and the Caspian Sea in the east," explains the Encyclopedia Britannica, in an edition predating the collapse of the Soviet empire. ". . . About 29,000,000 persons live in the Caucasus, and the region is unrivaled in the Soviet Union for the number of its nationalities."
In other words, another multi-ethnic powder keg.
Think civil war-wracked Georgia (the Eurasian one). Think combative Armenia and Azerbaijan (and disputed Nagorno Karabakh). Most recently, call to mind the ongoing battles in that would-be breakaway republic, Chechnya, and its battered capital, Grozny.
Le Carre was ripped-from-today's-headlines prescient in using the region as the crux of his plot. His rebels, though, are the oft-dispossessed Islamic Ingush, a valley and mountain people who are allies of the Chechnians and enemies of the Russians and the neighboring, historically Christian Ossetians.
The Caucasian Mountains and the region's patchwork provinces are mapped out on the endpapers of le Carre's book. Don't be deceived. While the Ingush and their rebellious dreams are an ultimate subject of "Our Game" (along with arms-dealing, ancient cultures, Russian mafias, cut-throat capitalism and the post-Soviet milieu in general), two-thirds of the tale is set in rural England
And it's about a menage a trois.
Involving ex-spies, of course.
Though he's only in his 40s, the demise of the Cold War put intelligence officer Timothy Cranmer out to pasture. He is well-to-do, however, has inherited an estate and is "treading a few grapes," trying to make something of his late uncle's ill-conceived vineyard. He's also aloof, detached from the messy reality of the world, "fireproof," as we learn, a "man who believes in nothing. . . . What passes for a kindly tolerance in him is in reality a craven acceptance of the world's worst crimes. He's an immobilist, an apathist and a militant passivist with a big V. And of course he's a dear sweet man."
Larry Pettifer, Cranmer's friend back to their school days, has been teaching at nearby Bath University. He's "a classy Englishman on the slide, an intellectual explorer, a Golden Boy Gone Wrong, a God-seeker sympathetic to the Party but not compromised by formally belonging to it, unanchored, immature, unstable, politically omnivorous, crafty in a vague way, and, when needed to be, larcenous." In simpler terms, he's a perfect spy, and not so long ago was indeed Cranmer's "joe" - his agent, a double agent. The Soviets thought he was theirs, but he was Britain's man all along.
Or was he?
"Our Game" begins with the disappearance of Pettifer. And, we learn, of Cranmer's ("Timbo" to Pettifer) live-in mistress, Emma Manzini, a beautiful young composer.
You can surmise what has happened.
Cranmer is telling the story. We get pieces of the puzzle in fitful bits. Le Carre has him relentlessly shifting from present to past to sometime in between. After awhile the reader may not be certain Cranmer is an entirely reliable narrator - he seems to be hiding things from us; he may be lying outright. But what's probably happening is Cranmer is on the verge of a breakdown. He's confused and almost out of control - though, we're told, he is usually considered overcontrolled.
He thought he was out of the spy game and in love, his life at "a new beginning." Instead he discovers he's been deceived and betrayed.
And his old bosses and successors think he may have been in cahoots with Pettifer, who, it turns out, has stolen "37 million quid" from the Russians along with his ex-Soviet controller, Konstantin Abrahamovich Checheyev, who is actually an Ingush.
As a result, Cranmer is soon a fugitive himself, a Hitchcockian "wrong man" on the run, using his spycraft to unravel the mysteries - and ultimately headed to a Caucasian mountaintop.
Le Carre's scattered narrative approach will have many a reader scratching his or her head in confusion and perhaps frustration. His mouthpiece, Cranmer, is observant, but the point of view is at once glib and stingy, as well as archly English. (The dark, lean prose of le Carre's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" is now 30 years in the past.) Nor is the romance nearly as appealing as the stories told in such best sellers as "The Russia House" and "The Night Manager."
Recurrent references to a vague but brutal fight between Cranmer and Pettifer, an example of the narrator's mental confusion, doesn't work particularly well. And among the major players, Emma Manzini is woefully undercharacterized, especially considering how much we learn about her two love interests. Many readers will find cause to wonder about le Carre's obvious political leanings this go-round, for he quite thoroughly berates the West for what he considers blindness and inaction in regard to self-determination among peoples once subject to the Soviets, now under the Russian thumb.
Nevertheless, "Our Game" (an old sport at a boys school, but also country vs. country, rebel vs. establishment, spy vs. spy, lover vs. lover) is le Carre at his most insightful. He'll have many a reader thinking about "fashionable and unfashionable wars," "hopeless causes" and "compassion fatigue."
They'll be questioning the status quo - international and interpersonal - and wondering what in the world's going to happen next.