Marionettes (novel)

Marionettes (original title: A Most Wanted Man ) is a spy novel by the English writer John le Carré . The German translation by Sabine Roth and Regina Rawlinson was published like the original edition in 2008. The novel is set in Hamburg after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and shows how a young Muslim is targeted by the terrorist manhunt and becomes a plaything of secret service intrigues. In 2014, the film version came A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn in theaters.

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After spending time in prison in Russia and Turkey , where he was - according to him wrongly - accused of terrorist activities with an Islamist background and tortured , the young Muslim Issa Karpov fled to Germany via Sweden and Denmark with the support of people smugglers . The story he tells the lawyer Annabel Richter from the Hamburg refugee aid organization Fluchthafen sounds adventurous: His father was the infamous Soviet Colonel Grigory Borisowitsch Karpov, who raged in Chechnya and raped his mother before he fell in love with her and the common one Child Ivan, who called himself Issa, made his sole heir. From his espionage work for the British secret Karpov had black money accounts in the millions when in Hamburg resident private bank Brue Frères AG . With the same money Issa now wants to build a secure future for his planned medical studies.

Annabel Richter is touched by the young Muslim and his apparent naivete in dealing with the western world. She calls in to the Scottish banker Tommy Brue, where the mention of the so-called “ Lipizzaners ” brings back bad memories. They are the only black mark in the honorable banking career of his father Amadeus Edward Brue, but it was precisely they who earned him the Order of the British Empire . Tommy, the meanwhile aging owner of an ailing bank, who lacks above all human affection in his life, feels embarrassed by the brisk and pretty lawyer and is putting out 50,000 euros from his private coffers to secure Issa's future.

But the young Chechen has long been targeted by international secret services . Both the British and American secret services have local contacts in Hamburg. Günther Bachmann, the idiosyncratic head of the background special unit at the Hamburg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and his partner Erna Frey want to recruit Issa as a decoy to contact Dr. Abdullah - code name: milestone - stalking. The Islamic scholar not only sits on the board of numerous Muslim aid organizations, he is also suspected of diverting donations to finance Islamist terrorist groups, a man who, it is said, does ninety-five percent good and five percent supports the bloody fight. Bachmann guarantees the judge impunity and German citizenship for Issa if the latter paves the way to Abdullah. Against her convictions, the lawyer gets involved in the game of the secret services and deceives her clients in the belief that she will achieve the best for him.

Tommy Brue must be the middleman in contacting Dr. Miming Abdullah, to whom the gullible Issa wants to transfer his father's bloody money to support aid organizations in his Chechen homeland. The Muslim scholar is suspicious, but cannot refuse a donation of twelve million. His monitored telephone traffic subsequently corroborates the suspicion against him. Disguised as a taxi driver, Bachmann plans to gain access to Dr. Abdullah, but at the last moment his operation is canceled without comment by a higher authority. Only minutes later a delivery truck rushes into the meeting, from which hooded men jump, the Dr. Abduct Abdullah and Issa Karpov at gunpoint. It was the Americans who, with their methods, took control of the German investigators and let the suspects disappear into their camps without a legal process. Nobody doubts Issa Karpov's guilt either, as Bachmann's fictitious action seems to have proven that he wanted to support terrorism. Annabel Richter and Tommy Brue, who were only puppets in this secret service game, are stunned.

background

The two main characters in the novel are based on real models. In 1992, while researching the novel Our Game in Moscow , le Carré met a 21-year-old Chechen who, like the character in the novel, was the son of a colonel in the Russian occupation army and a raped Chechen woman and who converted to Islam out of opposition to his father. Le Carré also took his first name from the novel: Issa, the Chechen word for Jesus. Tommy Brue, on the other hand, goes back to a Scottish banker who enjoyed drinking, whom le Carré met 40 years ago in Vienna, where he wanted to advertise him for a numbered account.

As the third main character, the author named the city of Hamburg, where he himself had spent some time in the service of the British secret service, after he had been exposed as the author of The Spy Who Came From the Cold . During the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he happened to be in the city where the perpetrators of the Hamburg terrorist cell around Mohammed Atta had lived. A Hamburg organization, the church help center for refugees fluchtpunkt , can also be found in the novel under the modified name Fluchthafen .

Another important influence on the novel was an encounter with Murat Kurnaz , imprisoned in Guantanamo, who revived the author's memory of the Issa figure. Le Carré met Kurnaz twice for a full day in Bremen and England. In the end, he was certain that Kurnaz had been innocently imprisoned. Le Carré criticizes the Western secret services for living in a “technological bubble” of digital surveillance before September 11, 2001, which cut them off from information about the terrorists. From his point of view, the “ war on terror ” can only be won through understanding, not through violence.

Reviews

Hendrik Werner reminds Die Welt that "the playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt [...] in his theoretical writings named the grotesque as the only text form that could do justice to a complex, obscure reality." According to Werner, le Carré Dürrenmatt followed "In its traditional genre, when it depicts a monstrously ramified political reality in the metaphor of a (twisted) puppet, which for most people is just as difficult to understand as the laws of the market and the aporias of the financial crisis." Le Carré surrenders with his novel on the other hand "directly into the fear center of the western world: the fear of Islamic terror - and a culture of suspicion bordering on paranoia , which blossoms cruelly".

In this context and less in his characters [such impressive characters as in earlier novels George Smiley or Magnus Pym are found in vain] Publishers Weekly saw the particular strength of the novel: “The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9 / 11 intelligence agencies that should be allies [...] ".

Ijoma Mangold writes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Marionetten “shows masterfully how an entire security bureaucracy is formed around a catchphrase - jihadism ”.

Günther Grosser sees in the Berliner Zeitung that "le Carré has now found its way back to its old strength after a few somewhat weaker novels".

Thomas Wörtche, on the other hand, considers the novel in his review for Deutschlandradio Kultur to be le Carrés "probably the most boring, toothless and calculable novel of the last 15 years".

Peter Körte finds in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung : “In all its opacity, it is constructed very transparently. Only the tone in which le Carré tells is very sedate [...] It goes without saying with a man like le Carré that you don't put the book down until the last ramifications have been traced. "

In the Tagesspiegel, Jochen Vogt does not regard marionettes as " a novel of the key , but rather a story that confidently balances the 'war on terror' and its topicality, typical set pieces of the political thriller and basic moral questions," ultimately as an "outstanding novel."

In the daily newspaper Jörg Sundermeier tears the book as "a quick-knit novel that is not even really exciting," and criticizes the "good-evil dichotomy , which is completely pointless these days."

Tobias Gohlis sees Issa on arte.tv as “one of the most touching innocent characters that John le Carré has created, a soul brother of his last hero, the half-Kenyan, half-British interpreter Bruno Salvador from Secret Melody , a distorting mirror picture of the author as a youngster Man, ”and considers marionettes to be“ le Carré at its best: a clowning and a treatise (on the fact that even the best cannot remain innocent), a love story and an espionage plot, a fairy tale and an indictment. Accused, as always in the last few novels, of the blind, arrogant imperialism of the USA. A big, funny, sad book about weak, upright, impotent people. "

Adaptations

In 2014 Anton Corbijn filmed the novel under its original title A Most Wanted Man . The main roles were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman , Rachel McAdams , Willem Dafoe , Daniel Brühl , Nina Hoss and Grigoriy Dobrygin . The soundtrack came from Herbert Grönemeyer .

In 2008 Herbert Knaup read an abridged version of the novel for the publishing house Hörbuch Hamburg .

expenditure

• John le Carré: A Most Wanted Man. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-416-59488-8 .
• John le Carré: puppets. Translated from the English by Sabine Roth and Regina Rawlinson. Ullstein, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-550-08756-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Interview on amazon.de .
2. ↑ vanishing point thanks John le Carré! on the vanishing point page , November 18, 2008.
3. ↑ Michael Jürgs : The man who can not only do cold . In: Hamburger Abendblatt from November 1, 2008.
4. ↑ Maike Schiller: The price of democracy . In Hamburger Abendblatt of November 10, 2008.
5. ↑ Hendrik Werner: Good! John le Carré benefits from terror . In: Die Welt from November 8, 2008.
6. ↑ Fiction Reviews: A Most Wanted Man . In: Publishers Weekly of August 4, 2008.
7. ↑ Ijoma Mangold : Your own creatures  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 17, 2010.
8. ^ Günther Grosser: Terror trauma in Hamburg . In: Berliner Zeitung of November 15, 2008.
9. ↑ Thomas Wörtche : Hunt for Islamist Terrorists . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from November 24, 2008.
10. ↑ Peter Körte: Knowing what you don't know . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung No. 48, November 30, 2008, page B4.
11. ↑ Jochen Vogt: Secret and official . In: Der Tagesspiegel from November 30, 2008.
12. ↑ Jörg Sundermeier : The good uncle le Carré . In: the daily newspaper of November 22, 2008.
13. ↑ Tobias Gohlis : Crazy Innocence ( Memento of the original from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: arte.tv from November 7, 2008.