The genocidal ethnic strife in neighboring Rwanda has spilled over the flagrantly porous eastern borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a murderous mixture of refugee Rwandan génocidaires, warlord armies, meddlers from Uganda and Burundi, and mercenaries of many stripes prolongs and complicates a conflict that has claimed, since its commencement, in 1998, four million Congolese lives, most of them women and children, from war-related violence, hunger, and disease.
Now, in “The Mission Song” (Little, Brown $26.99), he has turned to Joseph Conrad’s old heart of darkness itself, upriver on the Congo. In “Absolute Friends” (2003), the sore spot became le Carré’s fury at the American and British intervention in Iraq.
In “Our Game” (1995), it was the small, mostly Muslim republic of Ingushetia, striving for freedom from Russia, that huge remnant of the defunct Soviet Union in “The Tailor of Panama” (1996), it was the bedevilled isthmus to our south in “Single & Single” (1999), the financial underworld of the new Russian states in “The Constant Gardener” (2000), perfidy in Kenya by the pharmaceutical industry. there, as Robert Lowell wrote decades ago in his poem “July in Washington,” “the stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth.” John le Carré, the leading fictional dramatizer of the clandestine struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist bloc, maintains a brisk trade in hugger-mugger, searching in each new novel for a fresh locale, a newly sore spot. Many outside the borders of the United States, and many within those borders, place its originating center in Washington, D.C. For decades, it had its capital in the Kremlin and the inner councils of Beijing now it gathers thickly but elusively in the alleys of Baghdad and the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hugger-mugger is part of life, especially under modern political conditions.
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