![]() ![]() ![]() Le Carré, however, welcomed plotting on a broader canvas. The fall of the Berlin Wall was predicted to spell the end of the spy novel. Communism may have been the cause of the Cold War, but not all the soldiers are evil: “half-angels fighting half-devils” in the words of one of his characters. Le Carré’s world of espionage is never black and white but is a world shaded in grey. John Le Carre at the 2016 premiere of The Night Manager at the International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany (Gregor Fischer via Getty Images) This tension – whether the ends justified the means – is most obvious in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third novel, and the one which launched his career as a full-time writer. Le Carré’s characters continually agonised over the lengths to which liberal democracies should go, or must go, in order to defend these ideals. In a 2017 interview, he defined these ideals as “a notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance. Those ideals are a central concern of his early novels. The ideals that had driven the West in the war against communism came to be forgotten, according to le Carré. Above all, le Carré showed in his later novels an increasing disillusionment with the United States as the acknowledged leader of the victors. ![]() The vacuum was filled, according to le Carré, by opportunistic politicians, rampant capitalism, nationalism, isolationism, rapacious multinational corporations, international criminal organisations and a Russian kleptocracy. Finally, counter-hegemonic forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world, namely China and some Islamic societies.The fall of the Berlin Wall was predicted to spell the end of the spy novel. The models of development, structures of clientage, unprecedented militarization of societies, designs of imperial enlightenment, and even many gender and racial/cultural relationships followed similar tracks within, and often between, the two camps. The new imperial–national relationship between superpowers and the client states also accommodated developments such as decolonization, multiculturalism, and new ideologies, thus producing a hegemonic configuration characterizing the period. ![]() The rivalry took place within a common frame of reference, in which a new historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism worked in remarkably parallel ways across the superpower divide. As a historical period, the Cold War may be seen as a rivalry between two nuclear superpowers that threatened global destruction. ![]()
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