The Tailor of Panama (novel)

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The Tailor of Panama (English original title: The Tailor of Panama ) is a novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1996. The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published the following year. The main character of the novel is a British tailor who, in Panama, founded a network of secret agents because of his illustrious clientele and his storytelling talent . In 2001, a film adaptation of the novel by John Boorman with Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan was released .

content

At the men's outfitter Pendel & Braithwaite in Panama City , all the celebrities of the Central American state frequent. Whether politicians, bankers or drug dealers, they all entrust the tailor Harry Pendel with their private and business secrets while taking measurements. So it is no wonder that the young and ambitious agent of the British foreign intelligence service Andrew "Andy" Osnard chose his compatriot Pendel as an informant soon after his arrival in Panama . With Pendel's secret past life, of which not even his wife Louisa suspects, he blackmailed the tailor, because the tailor learned his trade in a British prison where he was incarcerated and his honorable partner, the court tailor Braithwaite , just made up. With a rice farm acquired from his wife's fortune, he has gone into debt and is on the verge of ruin.

Under pressure from Osnard, Pendel adorns his confidential information more and more and invents a "silent opposition" in Panama that is supported by opponents of the regime and radical students and is preparing a coup . At the head of this non-existent conspiracy he puts his friend Mickie Abraxas, who was once imprisoned under the Manuel Noriegas regime and broken in custody, so that since then he has only been drinking and living the day. He also assigns his employee Marta, his former lover, a key position in an alleged conspiracy of radical students until she was smashed in the face by Noriega's thugs in his presence. And through his wife, the assistant to political advisor Ernesto Delgado, he claims to have received information about an impending sale of the Panama Canal to Japanese investors.

Both Pendel and Osnard live well from the payments to the agent network allegedly built by Pendel under the cover name BUCHAN, but suddenly the high-ranking secret service employee Luxmore announces his visit to Panama and threatens to expose the fraud. When the Panamanian police question Mickie Abraxas about his alleged espionage activities, the latter kills himself to avoid being arrested again. Pendel is dismayed by the consequences of his fooling around, but on instructions from Osnard, he disguises his friend's suicide as a murder that can be blamed on the Panamanian leadership. This information, dutifully passed on by the British to their American allies for whose favor they are courting, provides the United States with the pretext it needs to launch Operation Safe Passage, which, like a few years earlier in Operation Just Cause , is using to launch a military strike against Panama to secure their political and economic interests in the Central American country.

The employees of the British embassy were withdrawn on time. Osnard and Ambassador Maltby have previously taken the gold bars in support of the alleged "silent opposition" and are enjoying their vacation, while Pendel sees the slums of Panama City being bombed again by American forces . Without a word, he leaves his wife Louisa to stand by Marta, whom he abandoned during the last invasion. But he doesn't find her and approaches a ball of fire that is supposed to lead him to Mickie and Marta and a world in which nobody confuses his dreams with reality.

background

While doing research for his novel The Night Manager , John le Carré traveled to Panama in the early 1990s for talks with arms dealers. He found a country that, in its dependence on the USA, formed a “microcosm of US colonialism ” for him and developed ideas for a novel about the Central American state. As the main character, he designed a hairdresser who had access to the leading circles of Panamanian society until le Carré met the English bespoke tailor Doug Hayward, whose charm and personality made the character Harry Pendel flash in him for the first time. A tailor seemed to him the perfect embodiment of a storyteller who changed the personality of his customers through clothing until they became his inventions.

The Tailor of Panama is a tribute to le Carrés to his great predecessor in British espionage literature Graham Greene and his satire, Our Man in Havana, about a vacuum cleaner agent who invents intelligence, also acting in Central America . Le Carré reread the novel in the 1980s and wrote in his acknowledgment: "After Greene's Our Man in Havana , I could not break away from the idea of ​​a news creator." The code name BUCHAN for the fictional agent network is an homage to another Old Masters of British Spy Fiction: John Buchan , the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps . Le Carré classified The Tailor of Panama among his most successful works - alongside The Spy Who Came From the Cold , Dame, König, Ace, Spy and The Eternal Gardener .

After the novel was published, there was an aftermath when a man named Sior Pendle contacted le Carré's English publisher Hodder & Stoughton and traced the character of Harry Pendel back to the life story of his father, the tailor George Pendle of Pendle & Rivett in Savile, London Row , who lived in Paraguay and was recruited as an agent for the British secret service. Le Carré rejected any knowledge of the predecessor in a reply. He simply borrowed the surname Harry Pendels from the German word Pendel .

reception

The Panama Tailor was published in the UK on October 14, 1996, and three weeks later had topped the Sunday Times bestseller list . Until January 1997, the novel was in the top ten of the list. Weaker - especially in comparison with its successful predecessors - were the sales figures in the United States, where the novel only stayed briefly in the New York Times bestseller lists and rose to seventh place.

In his review in the New York Times Book Review , Norman Rush le Carrés called his unexpected foray into satire a "tour de force" that violates almost every rule of the genre and can best be described with the oxymoron "nonviolent thriller". However, the American figures in particular are only outlined, which may be based on “Mr. le Carré's famous ambivalent attitude towards Americanity ”. In addition, the pendulum turns out to be “once again a literary incarnation of Judas ”, even if le Carré may not have intended it. In several letters to the New York Times , le Carré protested against an allegation of literary anti-Semitism and emphasized that the Judeo-Irish pendulum was “the loveliest figure I have created,” except for Rush, nobody else took offense at Pendel's Judaism and the rest of his life Opinion on the subject is "unprintable". A year later, Salman Rushdie joined the debate and engaged in a skirmish on the Guardian's letters page with le Carré, who years earlier had opposed a paperback copy of the Satanic Verses .

The German translation also stayed on Spiegel's bestseller list for several months and reached seventh place in November 1997. Ruth Klüger praised the idea of ​​an impostor as a spy, whose inventions add further misdeeds to a world full of misdeeds: “The comedy of this novel construction turns into tragedy”. Compared to its role model Greene, however, the novel is too bloated and remains - despite all efforts to "enduring truths about the human condition " - in the end "just an exciting spy novel". Eberhard Falcke sees Harry Pendel as one of the typical le Carré “vulnerable secrets” who are only kept upright by “the solid structure of the conspiracy”. The author is one of the “soul researchers of the espionage genre”: “He illuminates the mysterious niches of the inner life of his heroes with the same devotion as the tricks of the political masterminds.” For Hans Christoph Buch, “the book falls into two unconnected halves: one On the one hand a psychological psychological drama of Dostoyevsky density, on the other the rapid portrayal of a tropical banana republic in the backyard of the USA. ”Connected as a spy thriller, however, the novel kept him“ in suspense up to the last page ”.

Adaptations

The film adaptation of the novel was also released in 2001 under the title The Tailor of Panama . Le Carré himself was involved in the script, alongside experienced screenwriter Andrew Davies and director John Boorman . The main roles were played by Geoffrey Rush as Pendulum, Jamie Lee Curtis as his wife and acting James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan as secret agent Osnard, which is alluded to by some Bond references in the film. The later Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe had his first screen appearance , while old master Harold Pinter completed a cameo as the ghost of Pendel's uncle. Despite this star ensemble, le Carré's biographer Adam Sisman describes the result as “inexplicably weak” and “disappointing”, an example of how difficult it is to strike the right note with black humor .

In 1999 the WDR produced a three-part radio play based on the novel in the adaptation of Uta-Maria Heim . Directed by Klaus Wirbitzky . The speakers included Friedhelm Ptok , Stefan Behrens , Joachim Król , Rita Russek , Daniela Ziegler and Siemen Rühaak .

expenditure

  • John le Carré: The Tailor of Panama . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1996, ISBN 0-340-68478-X .
  • John le Carré: The Tailor of Panama . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-462-02637-2 .
  • John le Carré: The Tailor of Panama . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. Heyne, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-453-14734-0 .
  • John le Carré: The Tailor of Panama . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. List, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-548-60851-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Adam Sisman: John le Carré. The biography . Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , chapter 22.
  2. ↑ John le Carré: Acknowledgments . In: The Tailor of Panama . List, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8437-0842-5 .
  3. ^ Nina King: From Greene Land to Panama . In: The Washington Post, November 5, 1996.
  4. ^ "Tour de force [...] nonviolent thriller [...] Mr. le Carré's famous ambivalence toward Americanity [...] yet another literary avatar of Judas". Quoted from: Norman Rush : Spying and Lying . In: The New York Times, October 20, 1996.
  5. ^ "Harry Pendel is the most lovable character I have created". Quoted from: "The Tailor of Panama" . In: The New York Times, November 3, 1996.
  6. ↑ "Mine is unprintable." Quoted from: "The Tailor of Panama" . In: The New York Times, November 17, 1996.
  7. ↑ Literature . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1997, pp. 248 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Ruth Klüger : Fine cloth, perfect lies . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1997, pp. 212 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Eberhard Falcke: The tailor of Panama . In: Deutschlandfunk , undated.
  10. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch : The world is a solid conspiracy . In: Die Zeit from September 19, 1997.
  11. ↑ The tailor of Panama in the ARD radio play database.