HUMAN WRECKAGE

Agent Running in the Field

My father moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 1973, maybe 1974. Dad died in 2014. The two of us did not spend a lot of time together during those four decades in between. As I’ve lived these past five years knowing he will never again be at the other end of a telephone line, I’ve realized he did his best to set me up in life and for life in his quiet, thoughtful and necessarily distant way.

I can write for hours and not scribble or type a single word. That sort of stasis is a peculiar sort of agony. “Sure the sentence is grammatically incorrect but its meaning is clear and it sounds better. Oh…” With advertising copy that conflicted inactivity became something of an ethical dilemma. “Is it fair to bill for pacing and smoking? I’m selling two commodities here, one of which is time. Yes, but…” The back-handed miracle of middle age, semi-retirement, is that I can now write what I want when I want and my time-killing skills have markedly improved.

Since I signed my first lease for independent shelter in first year university I’ve carted a modest yet quality library between apartments and houses, cities and provinces. When I get stuck on a page now, hung up on a comma or a semi-colon, I scan the spines that surround my work area in the Crooked 9 for inspiration. As I contemplate the reference volumes, the histories, the sports writing and some of the world’s great novels, I don’t think of their authors and their subjects, I think of my father and the foundation he patiently and stealthily laid. “Dad gave me that one, that one too and that.” Dad was born in 1924; his collection of Shakespeare’s works, published around that time, is upstairs in the living room anchoring an elegant library table.

My father was a very precise man. His McGill engineering degree was interrupted by the Second World War. Crossword puzzles could be filled in with ink provided one wasn’t too hasty, fooled by the puzzler’s cryptic clues. He instructed me to write the number eight as two circles, much neater than my left-handed Mobius strip. Printing was a more effective way to communicate than cursive because the writer had an iota of additional time to consider his words. Letters from my father were always on sheets of graph paper, one letter per square. I acquired that habit and my printing (and my late older brother’s) looks exactly like Dad’s. Later in his life when he used unlined, personalized stationery, I could tell by the squared off bottom of each letter that he used a steel ruler to keep his lines straight and his margins true.

Dad’s favourite novelist was John le Carre. My favourite living author is John le Carre. A portrait of my father in his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform rests on a bookshelf near the hardcover editions of le Carre’s complete works. Some of the books are from my father’s library, some were gifts from him and some I bought myself. The three of us are connected by invisible strands of spider silk, enough perhaps to motivate an agent running in the field.

My father never did complete his engineering degree. He went back to school after the war but quit in frustration. He mentioned that time in his life just once. “After what I’d been through what could anyone say to me?” I believe my father’s experiences overseas taught him that there was a space between right and wrong and that that space was amoral and murky. This theme runs through all of le Carre’s novels and I’m sure it resonated with a particular veteran.

My father and I will always share a natural bond. Dad introduced me to his favourite writer and I was enthralled, hook, line and sinker. I appreciate le Carre’s writing on another level too, that much more because I know how much pleasure Dad derived from his prose. Le Carre transcended his genre and transformed the spy thriller into literature. His style is as dense as his plots. The reader must become something of an intelligence analyst because moves made in a great game played in a wilderness of mirrors may not be as they appear. Details of feints and deceptions, divided loyalties, the moral ambiguities of crimes committed to serve the greater good stack up enough to fill a dossier. A leaping off point for a new reader of le Carre is not Eric Ambler or Ian Fleming but rather conflicted Catholic convert, Graham Greene.

Following the cessation of the Cold War, the former MI5 and MI6 operative turned his attention to international banking, Big Pharma, arms dealing, money laundering and terror financing. Le Carre is pushing 90 now but remains amazingly prolific. A definitive biography by Adam Sisman was published in 2015 and quickly followed by le Carre’s own memoir The Pigeon Tunnel. But his fiction has not ceased. A Legacy of Spies which harks back to 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold appeared in 2017. Agent Running in the Field was published just last week. I do not know if my father had time enough to enjoy 2013’s A Delicate Truth; I know we talked about its publication but not the story which minutely relates the folly of a plausibly deniable special forces “extraction” of a most wanted jihadist.

Dad died on 11 November. I’ve always believed that date befitting of the man I knew. It’s approaching now, as surely as winter. I miss my father and I will always miss him. But grief is a peculiar thing. Dad himself said, “I had a good run.” I accept that; I understand that the great wheel of generations will always turn. I do not grieve my loss so much as his loss because I know that my father has missed four or five books that would have delighted him. But those recent le Carres are shelved with Dad’s books beside his RCAF picture and so, there they are and here the three of us shall remain.             

     

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