The night manager

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Der Nachtmanager (German first edition: Der Nacht-Manager , English original title: The Night Manager ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1993. In his fourteenth novel, le Carré turns against the struggle of British intelligence services after the end of the Cold War the illegal arms trade . The night manager of a hotel is assigned to work as an informant on an international arms dealer. The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published in the same year as the original edition . The television series The Night Manager , based on the novel, was produced by the BBC and AMC and aired in 2016.

content

The Englishman Jonathan Pine is the night manager of the Zurich Palace Hotel Meister . Growing up in orphanages and living in divorce, he loves the quiet and solitude of his nightly work. Especially since a traumatic incident six months ago when he was employed at the Queen Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo . The hotel belonged to Freddie Hamid, the youngest offspring of a powerful Egyptian clan, and Pine had fallen in love with his bewitchingly beautiful wife Sophie, who seemed to reciprocate his feelings. One day Sophie entrusted him with safekeeping top-secret documents relating to a planned shipment of illegal weapons from a Bahamas- based British arms dealer named Richard Onslow Roper. Pine, realizing the explosiveness of the documents, informed the British embassy , which however did nothing but warn their compatriot Roper. As a result, Sophie was found brutally murdered.

Six months later, Pine has still not got over the death of his lover when one night, of all people, the arms dealer Roper stays at the Meister Palace Hotel . In his wake are some of the henchmen of his dubious business, including his authorized signatory Major Corkoran, known as "Corky", and Lord Alexander "Sandy" Langbourne. But there is also Roper's lover Jemima, called "Jed", Marshall among them, a woman whose charisma Pine reminds Sophie from the very first moment. Despite his remorse for betraying Sophie, Pine, the son of a British sergeant who fell in action, proves himself to be a patriot again and passes the information he spied on during Roper's stay on to the British embassy.

This time, Pine's information goes to the right place: intelligence officer Leonard Burr, infamous for his extra tours, and his dutiful corrective, retired soldier Rob Rooke. They belong to a service that is independent of the Central Intelligence Unit, which the Secretary of State Rex Goodhew recently set up to ensure greater transparency in the British secret service and which has been on the trail of the international arms dealer Roper since it was founded. Burr recognizes the potential of the night manager who is ready to break with his previous life after asking himself the question of meaning . With the help of Operation Burdock, he gives Pine a legend that turns him into a killer wanted by the police, and smuggles him into the arms dealer's inner circle by thwarting a fictitious kidnapping attempt on Roper's son.

While Pine is gradually gaining not only the trust of his new employer, but also the heart of his lover Jed, Operation Burdock becomes a plaything behind the scenes for the different spheres of interest of Americans and British. The central news analysis, headed by Geoffrey Darker, also stabbed Goodhew's competing service in the back and went so far as to prevent informants Dr. Uncovering Paul Apostoll, a middleman between Roper and the Colombian drug cartels , whereupon he is brutally murdered. As a result, Pine is also found out as an informant, is taken into custody by Roper's bodyguards, interrogated and tortured. In a final proof of loyalty to his clients, he smuggled exact data about two ship passages from his captivity: an illegal arms delivery by Roper to Colombia and their payment in the form of a delivery of Colombian drugs to Europe. But there is no access: Goodhew cannot prevail in the decisive meeting before the minister against Darker, who torpedoes the noble motives of Pines and his credibility by citing the false legend as a wanted murderer against him.

Without political backing, it is now Burr who goes on one of his notorious solo trips. He blackmailed colleagues and forged documents in order to put pressure on Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, a British sales representative who also acts as Roper's intermediary for arms deliveries to British officials. By tricking him into believing that Darker was blown, arrested and searched his property, Bradshaw provided him with evidence of something he had suspected for a long time: the corrupt Darker is teaming up with Roper and is running Operation Burdock himself. Knowing that Bradshaw and Darker, who are politically networked to the highest levels, will be taboo for official charges, Burr blackmailed at least one thing: the release of his blown agent Pine and the compromised Jed through their relationship. Supported by Burr, the former night manager, who is still officially a wanted murderer in Great Britain, settles with Jed incognito in southern England.

Style and shape

Rudolf Walter Leonhardt described Der Nachtmanager , like all of le Carré's novels since the Smiley phase, as an extensive “tome” that had to offer a high entertainment factor in order to keep the reader interested. Although the author repeatedly builds up tension, breaks it off again and takes breaks, according to the passages around the internal secret service quarrels, where the reader can rest. The novel offers numerous settings ( Zurich , London , Ireland , Cornwall , Québec , Louisiana , Bahamas , Miami , Curaçao , Antigua , Venezuela up to the return to Cornwall) and a staff that is reminiscent of Tolstoy in its scope . Le Carré characterizes his characters by their linguistic style, which, however, is often lost in translation. Together with the complicated sentence structure, this ensures that the novels are not easy to read.

interpretation

After the end of the Cold War , according to Tina Brown , editor of the New Yorker , le Carré had been prophesied from various quarters that he would lose his subject and now had nothing more to write about. Le Carré himself pointed out, however, that he had already anticipated and longed for this end of the Cold War era in his works several times, from Agent on his own behalf , A blinding spy , The Russian House to The Secret Companion . In Der Nachtmanager , he now replaces the Soviet Union's missing enemy image with international arms dealers and drug cartels. A character in his novel states that it makes no difference whether you hunt spies or criminals.

For le Carré, his book is about evil in the form of indifference and inaction, decadence and selfishness, as well as the unscrupulousness of multinational corporations. The end of the Cold War ended an era in the West, that of abundance, and led into a “moral wasteland”, a darkness that is reflected in the “night” of the title. One cannot permanently “sell weapons blindly into the night and continually benefit from the destruction of others”. The villain of the novel, the British gentleman roper, has for Julian Symons the seductive power of a Mephistopheles . According to le Carré, it is a metaphor for the fact that materialism is increasingly replacing moralism in our society . In contrast, he designed the positive main character Jonathan Pine, although only half the age of the author, as a self-portrait, one of “self-love, self-pity and self-caricature”.

In his plot, Der Nachtmanager recalls le Carré's greatest success The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold . Like there, a spy is smuggled into a hostile environment without a way back being mapped out. As there, those whose mission he carries out prove to be just as untrustworthy as the opponents he is supposed to spy on. Le Carré's sympathy is always with the agents on duty, who hold their heads out for the bureaucrats in the background and are ultimately betrayed by them. Unlike in many earlier novels, however, this time he has given his hero a happy ending . Here compared le Carré's novel with a comedy by Shakespeare : After the reader is "down to the deepest abyss of human folly," Shakespeare took up all the threads again and linked to a happy ending. For Symons, this unbelievable ending betrayed a novel that, in its internal logic, would have called for a tragic finale. He also criticized le Carré's romanticism , which turns Roper's lover Jed into a man's dream. Leonhardt therefore also reads the novel as a romance novel .

reception

The novel was several months in the bestseller list of the mirror , where he was ranked 9 in January 1994th In the same year he was awarded the third prize in the international category of the German Crime Prize . He is regarded as one of the role models of Dieter Wedel's TV multi-part series Der Schattenmann from 1996. In 2007, Claude-Oliver Rudolph read in an audio book version .

For Kolja Mensing , Der Nachtmanager is “one of the better books in the late work of the experienced espionage writer”. In the linguistic dress of a thriller, he succeeds in showing something “of the fateful British jumble of class interests, imperialist overestimation of himself and nationalistic interpretation of history”. According to Julian Symons, le Carré put on a “brilliant performance”, full of abundance, richness of detail and narrative drive, which le Carré's works of the last decade have lacked. Der Spiegel described the novel as “literature at its best on the one hand, and a sucking, captivating thriller on the other.” The author has reached “Mount Everest of his mastery”. After the death of Graham Greene , he was "unequaled". For Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, too, with Der Nachtmanager , le Carré was well on the way to becoming Greene's successor, who did not shy away from writing entertainment literature so as not to bore his readers.

filming

In 2016, the British-American television series The Night Manager , produced by the BBC and AMC , aired, in which the novel was slightly modernized. So the first part is now during the Arab Spring . The main roles were played by Tom Hiddleston , Hugh Laurie , Olivia Colman and Elizabeth Debicki . Directed by Susanne Bier . John le Carré can be seen in a cameo as a guest in a fish restaurant.

expenditure

  • John le Carré: The Night Manager . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1993, ISBN 0-340-59281-8 .
  • John le Carré: The Night Manager . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-462-02277-6 .
  • John le Carré: The night manager . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. List, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-471-79504-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Rudolf Walter Leonhardt: In the end there is love . In: Die Zeit of November 19, 1993.
  2. ↑ a b c Italie Hillel: John le Carre: Still Not in from the Cold . In: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 15, 1993.
  3. ↑ a b c Where is the lion that roars? John le Carré answers SPIEGEL questions about the “night manager” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1993, pp. 149-152 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b c d Julian Symons: Our Man In Zurich . In: The New York Times, June 27, 1993.
  5. ↑ a b Melancholy and Crime . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1993, pp. 147-149 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Merle Rubin : A Master of Spy Tales Uncovers a New Plot . In: The Christian Science Monitor of July 3, 1993.
  7. ↑ Fiction . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 1994, p. 228-229 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Trash shattered . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1996, pp. 228-229 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Kolja Mensing : Crime Scene: "The Forest of Forgetting" by Reginald Hill and "The Night Manager" by John le Carré . In: the daily newspaper of June 23, 2005.