With the end of the Cold War, John le Carre’s novels moved from spy vs. spy to man against a larger machine. The enemy may be political or corporate, but he is always amorphous. He cannot be tackled head-on; he is much too large and indistinct for direct action.
And so it is with his latest novel, “The Mission Song,” with some key differences. Never has le Carre brought the reader so close to the narrator and, in result, the story. And though his narrator, Bruno Salvador, a.k.a. Salvo, gets into some undeniably tough spots, he never loses a sense of humor that charms the reader and leavens the story.
Salvo is 29, an interpreter married to Penelope, a tabloid journalist. Some disparagingly describe him as a zebra, the illegitimate African son of an Irish missionary priest and a village headman’s daughter. She gave birth within the walls of a Congolese Carmelite convent: “Reasoning that they were better placed than she to provide me with a future, she consigned me to their mercy and, escaping at dead of night by way of the bath-house roof, crept back to her kind and family, who weeks afterwards were massacred in their entirety by an aberrant tribe, right down to my last grandparent, uncle, cousin, distant aunt and half-brother or sister.”
At the age of 10, Salvo sat in a mission house in the highlands of South Kivu and watched his father die. It was at this mission where Salvo’s ear for language first appeared, where he learned not just English, French and Swahili, but also became fluent in the diverse languages and dialects found only in the eastern Congo.
After his father’s death the church, providing for its own, sent Salvo to a British boarding school. Though not an easy transition, it proved to be a fruitful next step. He is taken under Brother Michael’s wing, and his gift for languages is further nurtured. By the time he is ready to step out on his own, he is more than a translator.
He says, “Never mistake, please, your mere translator for your top interpreter. An interpreter is translator, true, but not the other way around. … Your top interpreter has to think as fast as a numbers boy in a coloured jacket buying financial futures. Better sometimes if he doesn’t think at all, but orders the spinning cogs on both sides of his head to mesh together, then sits back and waits to see what pours out of his mouth.”
Salvo is in demand, but he can’t easily refuse an inconveniently timed call from the Ministry of Defence, asking him to take on “a vital bit of interpreting” for his country. They aren’t looking for him to do the sort of work he’s done in the past, sitting in a small room interpreting from tapes. This job is described as both proactive and deniable.
With different clothes and a new name, Salvo is flown to a secret meeting on an island in the North Sea. The conferees are a nameless international syndicate and representatives from the political factions in Kivu.
As explained to Salvo, the syndicate’s big idea is to pre-empt the elections, “get your man in place, give the People a fair slice of the cake for once, and let peace break out.” The words awaken in Salvo a long-buried love of home. But any plan that would bring democracy at the end of a gun barrel has someone in its sights, and the brain behind the trigger finger is rarely high-minded.
As Salvo races between translating the formal negotiations in the meeting room and eavesdropping from a basement listening post, he stumbles onto things he’s not supposed to hear. The syndicate’s motives are hardly as noble as originally presented. After all, the land they are arguing over has been long ravaged by war, in no small part because of its mineral richness. And Salvo, who introduces himself as a man not under obligation to his conscience, finds himself called to do the right thing.
“The Mission Song” is the riveting work of a master. The reader is first captured by Salvo’s voice, that of a somewhat self-deprecating man who accepts life’s turns. But as the story progresses, Salvo’s journey to courage becomes the driver. He is introduced as a man who knows that his marriage is stumbling, and one unconcerned enough with moral ambiguity to be embarking on an extramarital affair. But his choice of lovers is Hannah, a fellow countrywoman.
Hannah’s belief that their country deserves self-determination and his encounter with the syndicate’s naked greed awaken a long-slumbering moral sense. And then the question becomes whether he will find the courage to do the right thing – and what the right thing to do might actually be.
Le Carre’s pace never flags, and small details revealed early in the tale find themselves woven into the fabric of the conclusion. And the story, centered as it is on a part of the world that struggles for the West’s attention, brings to the fore the tragedy of the Congo in a way that the news stories cannot.
It’s just one story of one man’s love of the land in which he was raised. But the story is crafted by a teller who imprints it with graceful force, leaving it impossible for the reader to turn away.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
The Mission Song
By John le Carre
Little, Brown, 352 pages, $26.99
