Our game

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Our game (English original title: Our Game ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1995. In the same year, the German translation by Werner Schmitz was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . The novel is about two retired spies from the Cold War era who find a new role in the independence struggles in the Caucasus .

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When Lawrence, known as "Larry", Pettifer, a lecturer at Bath University , disappears from one day to the next, it goes almost unnoticed by the public. But police interrogation of his former classmate at Winchester College , Timothy Cranmer, who retired in Somerset on an uncle's inherited winery, reveals an unusual interest on the part of the authorities in the case and in Cranmer's possible involvement.

In fact, Cranmer has a lot to hide: he worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service during the Cold War and recruited Pettifer as an agent . The idealistic and communist ideas inclined towards Pettifer turned out to be ideal double agent , who pretended to the KGB - residents Volodya Zorin and his deputy, the cultural attaché Konstantin Tschetschejew spying, but in reality the Soviets only from SIS manipulated information had come. Pettifer suffered from the shared loyalties and felt his idealistic innocence abused by the secret service and especially his friend Cranmer. The latter saw in Larry a more moral and livelier version of himself. Thus, even after their mutual elimination after the end of the Cold War, the younger one disconnected his older friend's young lover Emma. Cranmer fears that he drowned Larry out of jealousy in a physical altercation at the Priddy pond .

When Cranmer goes to the modern secret service building complex, he learns what Pettifer is accused of: he and his former agent Chechenev, an Ingush , have cheated on the Russian state out of 37 million pounds. The money was intended for the independence struggle of the Caucasian peoples oppressed by Russia and ignored by the West , in which Pettifer finally found the ideal after a life full of betrayal, for which his work is worthwhile. He also infected Emma with his enthusiasm, so that she moved all of her jewelry and put it into the struggle for liberation. The SIS now assumes that Cranmer is in league with his long-time friend. He then goes into hiding, activates a long-prepared emergency identity and investigates on his own.

Cranmer gets on the trail of Macclesfield- based arms dealer May, with whom Pettifer and Emma contacted and who was murdered by Ossetians loyal to Russia . Then Cranmer is scared for his still beloved Emma, ​​but when he locates her in Paris , he realizes that he has lost her forever. Now all he has left is his friend Larry, and he travels to Moscow , where Zorin, who has since fallen out of favor, brings him into contact with Ingush rebels. After a long journey in secret, he finally met Checheyev in Ingushetia and learned of Larry's death at the side of the rebel leader Bashir Haji. It is now up to Checheyev to take the place of the dead Haji. And Cranmer, who has come to appreciate the Ingush way of life and understands that he has nothing left that would draw him back to his homeland, takes over the position of his dead friend at the side of the new rebel leader.

background

John le Carré (2008)

The end of the Cold War, the confrontation of the two superpowers USA and Soviet Union and their military blocs NATO and Warsaw Pact in 1990, marked a major turning point for le Carré in his work. Although he had written a few novels before that had little or nothing to do with the Cold War, it was mainly his espionage novels about George Smiley that were read as an interior view of the East-West conflict. Le Carré pointed out that espionage and espionage stories had existed long before the Cold War and would continue long after the Cold War ended. With his first major novel in the 1990s, The Night Manager , he turned to the problem of the global arms trade in 1993. In 1995, his second novel, Our Game , turned his gaze back to the collapsing Soviet Union and the new conflicts in Russia for the first time. As early as 1990 he had predicted in a speech: “The Russian bear is sick, the bear is bankrupt, the bear is afraid of its past, present and future, [...] but the bear is still armed to its teeth and very, very proud."

Issa Kostoyev (2008)

In 1993 le Carré visited Russia with his son and experienced a completely different country compared to his first visit in 1987. The economy was down, but the nouveau riche upper class reveled in luxury. The difference between rich and poor led him to say: "I began to feel more like a disappointed communist than as a victorious Westerner who looks at the people he helped to liberate, at least on paper." For example, the Ingush-born Issa Kostoyev, le Carré became aware of the ubiquitous racism against the Muslim minorities in Russia. Le Carré developed sympathy for the aspirations for autonomy and independence of the Islamic republics in the North Caucasus . He was particularly angry that this struggle for freedom was barely noticed, let alone supported, by the western states, since he had previously considered the right to self-determination and the liberation of victims of tyranny to be cornerstones of western anti-communism .

Le Carré wrote several essays on the subject. In 1996 he complained: “The West, it seems to me, broke every oath we made during the Cold War. We continued to protect the strong from the weak. When small peoples were slaughtered, a worried 'well, well' was the best we, the audience, could achieve. ”A good year earlier he had criticized that the Western states“ continued the Cold War by other means, almost one blind isolationism; with a determination that is horrifyingly revealed in Bosnia today: rather to tend our lofty backyards than to alleviate the misery of those we have liberated. With an insistence on the Cold War idea that superpowers had 'spheres of influence' where human rights did not count and the oppression of dissenting minorities could be encouragingly called 'order'. Much nicer than 'ethnic cleansing'. "

After his return to England, Le Carré carried out further research on the novel and maintained contact with several exiles from Chechnya and Ingushetia. A visit to Ingushetia at Kostoyev's invitation had to be canceled 48 hours before the start of the trip because unnamed authorities did not want to guarantee security. So Le Carré had to write the novel without ever being there. So the action takes place largely in his native England. As in many other works, le Carré showed a feeling for current issues by taking up the Caucasus conflict. When he presented the first version of the novel to his American agent in 1994, she still posed the naive question of whether Ingushetia was real or fictional. The war in Chechnya broke out two months later .

The novel had the working title The Passion of his Time , an allusion to the conversation between Cranmer and his former boss Merriman, in which the latter certifies that the old spy lived the passion of his time with his work. Other titles were The Road to Honeybrook Farm , A Man of the Caucasus and The Free Servant . The final title, Our Game, refers to the particular form of soccer played at Winchester College, from which the two main characters, Cranmer and Pettifer, come. But it also resonates with the view of espionage as a game, which the last KGB chairman Wadim Bakatin had expressed to le Carré and which Volodja Zorin takes up in the novel when he describes himself as Cranmer's "sparring partner". Even Rudyard Kipling called in his novel Kim historical conflict between Britain and Russia in the 19th century for supremacy in Central Asia The Great Game ( The Big Game ).

interpretation

At the center of the novel is an unstable triangle of three English protagonists: the first-person narrator Tim Cranmer, a retired intelligence officer, his young lover Emma and his former agent Larry Pettifer. The two men are counterparts to each other: Cranmer is introverted and inhibited, Pettifer extroverted and lively, Cranmer has withdrawn from the problems of the world to his remote country house, Pettifer passionately makes the fight of the Ingush his cause. In their battle for Emma, ​​the two lifelong friends become rivals, even enemies. But in the end, Cranmer continues the fight for which Pettifer gave his life. The novel revolves around topics such as betrayal and deception, the addiction and destruction that arises from a life of deception as a (double) agent, and the responsibility that people have to assume for manipulating others.

In contrast to the lively men and their difficult relationship, which gives the novel its psychological tension, Emma, ​​the female character, is in the shadow of many reviewers. It is only drawn from a distance, remains as puzzling and incomprehensible for the reader as it is described by the first-person narrator Cranmer. Like many female characters in le Carré's novels, such as George Smiley's unfaithful wife Ann, Emma is beautiful but unreachable, an object of unfulfilled passion. Diane Johnson commented in 1999: "Le Carré's women are faithless, unsteady, complicated and endured, the men jealous and always abandoned by an adored but unworthy woman who has walked up and away with another man like a cat."

Dietrich Schwanitz sees Timothy Cranmer as an alter ego of his author. For him, the novel crosses the line between literature and life. Le Carré designs his fictional heroes, whom he can never get rid of, such as the immortal smiley. Cranmer invented his agent Pettifer, designed him in his role as a double agent. But Pettifer becomes his own revenant who even a murderous exorcism cannot remove. As in a Pirandello drama, "the hero leaves his script, seduces the narrator's mistress and forces him to follow him on his quest and become like himself: a hero."

reception

Le Carré's British publisher Hodder & Stoughton made Our Game in May 1995 to test balloon against the Net Book Agreement , the book prices in the UK and Ireland. The book was the first novel to be offered in the mass market without a fixed retail price. Flanked by an aggressive marketing campaign, it reached number 1 on the UK bestseller list and sold 50% overall better than le Carré's previous novel, The Night Manager . The novel was also a sales success in the United States, reaching number 2 on the bestseller list.

The reviews in both countries were mostly positive. Michael Ratcliffe spoke in the Observer of an "extraordinary novel", Sean O'Brien in the Times Literary Supplement of a "compelling and thought-provoking work" that clearly surpasses the night manager . Louis Menand , in the New York Review of Books, identified an undertone of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim . John Updike, on the other hand, wrote a funny and wicked reckoning with le Carré in the New Yorker , in which he placed the author in the midst of other genre authors who are read by business people at airports, despite an “overheated expertise” in his prose, that of desire I would like to fabricate something other than just a thriller.

For Peter Demetz , however, le Carré differed from other "bestselling authors of the international intrigue novel by the unusual richness of its language" and the "Victorian talent for putting believable characters on their feet". "He makes world literary seriousness with a type of narrative that is otherwise dismissed as entertaining or trivial with a wave of the hand." Dietrich Schwanitz compared the novel in its political message and its romanticism with Botho Strauss ' essay Schwelling Bocksgesang from 1993, which is critical of civilization Thanks to the different cultural temperament of the Englishman, that his “British goat song” has not become a gloomy pamphlet, but a good novel.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "The Russian Bear is sick, the Bear is bankrupt, the Bear is frightened of his past, his present and his future, [...] But the Bear is still armed to the teeth and very, very proud." Quote from: Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 21: "Whatever are you going to write now?"
  2. ↑ "I began to feel more like a disenchanted Communist than a victorious Westerner surveying the people he had notionally helped to free." Quoted from: John le Carré: My New Friends in the New Russia: In Search of A Few Good Crooks, Cops and Former Agents . In: The New York Times, February 19, 1995.
  3. ↑ For more information on the person see the article Issa Kostoyev in the English language Wikipedia .
  4. ↑ a b c d Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 21: "Whatever are you going to write now?"
  5. ↑ John le Carré: Moscow Air . In: Spiegel Special 1/1996: The world of agents . Quoted from: Jost Hindersmann: John le Carré. The spy turned writer. NordPark, Wuppertal 2002, ISBN 3-935421-12-5 , p. 47.
  6. ↑ John le Carré: Sleeping Demons . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1994, pp. 114-117 ( online ).
  7. ↑ For more information on the sport, see the article Winchester College football in the English language Wikipedia .
  8. ↑ a b c Dietrich Schwanitz: A British goat song . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1995, pp. 181-185 ( online ).
  9. ^ “Le Carré's women are faithless, restless, complicated, and kept, the men mistrustful and always forlornly adoring of some unworthy woman who has gone off with another male, like a cat.” Quoted from: Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 22: "He makes us look so good"
  10. ↑ a b Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography. Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , Chapter 22: "He makes us look so good"
  11. ^ Peter Demetz : Caucasian Games . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 2, 1995.