'Russia and Europe'
Brown, Catherine (2026) 'Russia and Europe'. In: The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré. Cambridge Companions . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (In Press)
Abstract
This chapter identifies the European countries of most importance in le Carré's fiction as being Germany and Russia, followed by Switzerland, Austria and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic. Germany as a location, and a source of quoted literature, reflects le Carré's counter-cultural Germanophilia as well as his experience of working there for MI6. In his later works le Carré relates its participation in the War on Terror (and the terrorism that was its target) to Germany's wartime crimes. He represents Russia with much greater political, geographic and narrative distance, and in his Cold War-era fiction represents it as worsted by British intelligence to a greater degree than he believed to have been the case. Only after le Carré's first visit to Russia in 1987 did he represent the country inwardly and with sympathy; the narrative arc of The Russia House, which unconsciously points towards the imminent, pacific end of the Cold War, retrospectively ironises the frenzied efforts of Western security services to win that war which so much of his previous fiction had depicted. Yet after his second and last visit to Russia in 1993, the country becomes progressively distanced again - its domestic artistic and political culture (glimpsed in The Russia House) falling out of view - to the extent that it is presented as an enemy, in a way that it never was during the Cold War. Contradictions in the ethics of le Carré's subsequent treatments of Russia are identified, particularly in relation to the representation of Russia's minorities. His works present continuity between Russian crime and the Russian state; between Russia's tsarist and Communist pasts and its present; and between Russian and Western criminals and states. The emphasis of le Carré's critique falling on Western complicity with Russia caused him to overlook the far more significant Western antagonism of Russia, and the very phenomenon of the new Cold War, even whilst he shared the latter's Western prejudices. He did not, therefore, question the prevailing demonisation of Russia as he had once done that of Germany, nor perceive the madness of the new Cold War as he had done the old one. A new picture of le Carré emerges, as a man with a blind spot with regard to post-Soviet Russia.
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