A Delicate Truth By, Le Carre, John. A Delicate Truth, Le Carré’s new novel, opens in 2008, in Gibraltar, the site of a British-American counter-terrorism operation called Operation Wildfire. The opening chapter is seen through the eyes of a British diplomat whose faith in his bosses and eagerness to be seen as committed to anti-terrorism mark him as a guileless company man, fated to fall upward as a reward for not asking too many questions. Three years later, this aging innocent’s composure is ruffled by Toby Bell, a rising young foreign servant who is “that most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider.” (Using one of George W. Bush’s favorite self-descriptive nouns is probably not a coincidence.) When Toby, who is working on a novel in his spare time, compares notes with the now-retired diplomat, who is closer in age to the 81-year-old Le Carré, the effect is less reminiscent of Butch and Sundance and more as if the former intelligence officer Le Carré is writing a fantasy about both his younger self and the man he might have become if he’d stayed in the game and never wised up.
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