The Mission Song: A Novel (Hardcover)

by John le Carre (Author)
Key Phrases: dear late father, anonymous syndicate, top interpreter, Mai Mai, Lord Brinkley, Brother Michael (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bestseller le Carré (The Constant Gardener) brings a light touch to his 20th novel, the engrossing tale of an idealistic and naïve British interpreter, Bruno "Salvo" Salvador. The 29-year-old Congo native's mixed parentage puts him in a tentative position in society, despite his being married to an attractive upper-class white Englishwoman, who's a celebrity journalist. Salvo's genius with languages has led to steady work from a variety of employers, including covert assignments from shadowy government entities. One such job enmeshes the interpreter in an ambitious scheme to finally bring stability to the much victimized Congo, and Salvo's personal stake in the outcome tests his professionalism and ethics. Amid the bursts of humor, le Carré convincingly conveys his empathy for the African nation and his cynicism at its would-be saviors, both home-grown patriots and global powers seeking to impose democracy on a failed state. Especially impressive is the character of Salvo, who's a far cry from the author's typical protagonist but is just as plausible. (Sept.)
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From The Washington Post
I don't know what accounts for the longevity of so many contemporary American and European writers, in terms of both lifespans and productivity. Not too long ago, short lives were common in the literary world. Today, the likes of Saul Bellow, pounding the keys almost to the moment of his death at 89, or Philip Roth, who arguably has done his best work after becoming eligible for Medicare, or Gunter Grass, making headlines with his new memoir at 78, are the rule.

I am reminded of a comment Thomas McGuane made a few years ago: With so many authors living so long, a writer nowadays can remain a young writer well into middle age. Sixty is the new 40.

Now comes The Mission Song, the 20th novel by Britain's John le Carré, who turns 75 this year and shows no signs of fatigue. His prose is as lovely and expressive as ever; his ear for dialogue remains wonderfully acute. Each of the characters in The Mission Song speaks with a distinctive voice, so that the usual interjections of "so-and-so said" seem almost superfluous.

An ear for speech is the genius of le Carré's protagonist, Bruno Salvador, an interpreter fluent in English, French, Swahili and several other African languages such as Kinyarwanda (the native tongue of Rwanda) and Shi (spoken in the eastern Congo).

Salvo, as he's known to his friends (some of whom later become his enemies), came to this linguistic mastery early in life. Born in the eastern Congo, the orphaned love-child of an Irish Catholic missionary priest and a Congolese woman whom he never knew, he attended a secret school where the sons of errant priests were sent for higher education. There, his mentor and erstwhile lover, Brother Michael, inspired him to train as a professional interpreter in the tribal languages he'd absorbed from childhood.

Eventually, he arrived in England and gained British citizenship. The mixed-race foreigner furthered his integration into British society by marrying a white celebrity journalist, Penelope. The marriage has gone sour when the novel opens, and Salvo enters into an adulterous affair with Hannah, a Congolese nurse at a London Hospital. The love story, deftly handled, serves as a subplot to an intricate thriller.

Salvo is a star in his unusual profession and vain about his abilities. He relishes the fact that he is "the one person in the room nobody can do without." Early in the story, which he narrates, he tells us that there is a world of difference between a mere translator, who can get by with mediocre language skills and a good dictionary, and a top interpreter. Hired by large corporations, law firms and hospitals, he also works part-time for the British Secret Service in a London basement known as "The Chat Room." It looks like a boiler-room operation, but those people in cubicles wearing headsets are interpreters eavesdropping on sensitive telephone conversations all over the world.

In establishing his main character's backstory, le Carré's pacing is neither overly leisured nor mechanically efficient. The tale gets moving when the Chat Room supervisor assigns Salvo to act as a simultaneous translator at a hush-hush meeting between Congolese warlords and a shadowy syndicate of Western financiers. As naive as he is vain, ardent to serve queen and country, Salvo accepts. From then on, with the hooked reader in tow, he plunges into familiar le Carré territory, a world of conspiracies, treachery and deceit.

For all that, The Mission Song has a comic, light-hearted touch. At the same time, it has the moral seriousness of le Carré's other novel of Africa, The Constant Gardener. As in that tale about the machinations of big pharmaceutical companies in Kenya, the villain here is a multinational corporation. Indeed, with the extinction of the Soviet Union, global capitalism seems to be fueling le Carré's literary energies. The chess matches between George Smiley, his Cold War spymaster, and Smiley's Soviet adversary, Karla, have been replaced by confused, asymmetrical warfare between somewhat hapless individuals such as Justin Quayle, the British diplomat in The Constant Gardener, and corporate giants that know no boundaries, moral or geographical.

A less worldly writer, or one with more left-wing axes to grind, would be tempted to portray these global titans as the sole authors of Africa's endless tragedy. Le Carré avoids that trap and presents African autocrats for the corrupt kleptomaniacs many of them are. Salvo and Hannah excepted, nobody in this book has clean hands, but some hands are dirtier than others.

Africa has become "hot" in recent years, and I don't mean the climate. It's a must-stop on the itineraries of Western celebrities from Bono to Madonna to Bill Clinton. Plagued by AIDS and malaria, ruled by vicious tyrants, wracked by civil wars and genocide, it is the irresistible magnet for aid agencies and missionaries, for whom it remains the "dark continent" in need of their salvation. It also remains what it's been since the colonial era: the place where foreign business interests (chiefly Western but increasingly Chinese as well) can make lots of money and extract natural resources.

The Syndicate in The Mission Song combines both the impulse to save and the urge to plunder. Salvo, his African conscience stirred through his affair with Hannah, suffers from a bit of savior complex himself. The Syndicate's purported mission -- to democratize his native country while making it a safer place to do business, thus bringing freedom and prosperity to all -- sings its siren song to him.

None of the action takes place in Africa. The setting is confined to London and a nameless island in the British channel. There, the Syndicate's representatives confer with two warlords and the son of a rich Congolese entrepreneur, Honoré Amour-Joyeuse, who goes by the nickname of Haj. The purpose of this exercise is to get the Africans to sign a contract pledging support to the Syndicate's scheme, its centerpiece being the installation in the eastern Congo of a government led by an aging, charismatic messiah called the Mwangaza. Granted exclusive rights to the region's vital minerals, the Syndicate will ensure that its profits are equitably distributed to the people.

If this sounds fishy to you, it should, and therein lies the novel's only major flaw. The key that winds the spring that drives the story is Salvo's naiveté. Le Carré skillfully draws an idealistic character less than half his age, but the reader may find, as I did, Salvo's gullibility difficult to accept. Almost from the moment he's given the mission, you sense that something is dreadfully wrong and wonder why Salvo doesn't, too.

Consequently, his awakening, when in the course of his interpretive work he hears things not intended for his ears, seems a bit contrived, his disillusionment a little too predictable. Things don't end well for Salvo either, and I was left with the feeling that he allowed himself to be bamboozled.

Nevertheless, the vividness of le Carré's characterizations -- Haj is marvelous and almost upstages Salvo -- and his adroit navigation of a plot with more twists and turns than the mountain segment of the Tour de France compensate for this shortcoming.

The Mission Song is a minor work compared with le Carré's big Cold War novels, but his skepticism, compassion and sense of moral outrage are as much in evidence here as in A Perfect Spy or The Honorable Schoolboy. To categorize him, as many do, as a "spy" novelist is to do him a disservice; he uses the world of cloak-and-dagger much as Conrad used the sea -- to explore the dark places in human nature.

Reviewed by Philip Caputo
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First U.S. Edition edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316016748
• ISBN-13: 978-0316016742
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #215,870 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 1/2 Stars...Caught in a Tug-of-war, November 1, 2006

By	Eric Wilson "novelist" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Since the days of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "The Little Drummer Girl," I've followed le Carre's novels with heightened interest. Of late, however, he's lost me with an unfocused style. I picked up "The Mission Song" with skepticism.

Thankfully, I found here a story of undeniable appeal. The first-person narrator, Bruno Salvador, is an interpreter with an uneven marriage and on secret assignment with the British. His personality is more naive, more humorous and satirical, than most of le Carre's protagonists, lending the novel a lighter tone that still manages to make scathing remarks about western politics. The Bush and Blair administrations both get low marks here, and high-minded, white colonization is shown to be a greedy and violent proposition. Bruno, caught in a tug-of-war between his native allegiances and his British ties, must face the truth and consequences of his assignment. Is one secretive coup really intended for Eastern Congo's good? Or is there a more self-seeking motive behind the financial investment of the nebulous Syndicate?

Although we the readers never really doubt the motives of all involved, it's hard not to be swept along with Bruno's romantic (somewhat thinly drawn) and politic questions. This is a conflict that could relate to African scenarios two centuries ago or a decade in the future. It's a timeless tale, told with unflinching social remarks, while still remaining an entertaining story. Le Carre remembers to treat us as fiction readers, and not simply as a gathering of politicos. Once again, my interest is renewed, and I look forward to his next project.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars occasionally exciting, often tedious, February 5, 2007

By	Magic Man (Brigadoon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mission Song: A Novel (Audio CD)

In Le Carre's latest thriller, an expert interpreter of various African languages learns of a nefarious plot involving the Congolese government. At first I was intrigued with the fact that the protagonist Salvo is an interpreter. Nice twist, and I have some experience in both interpreting and in African language study (Swahili). But the narrator is so obsessed with his status that it becomes both distracting and annoying. Consider, for example, the following excerpts from the book: "I am...by profession a top interpreter of Swahili," "the code of your top interpreter is sacrosanct," "Never mistake, please, your mere translator for your top interpreter," "my top interpreter's ear," "your top interpreter responds without premeditation," "Salvo the top interpreter is there beside them," and there are many more. I mean, Come on!

A major portion of the book (maybe a third) takes place at a meeting of Congolese elites and European mercenaries making plans. The meeting drags on forever, and with the exception of a brief interlude of torture, it gets pretty tiresome. No action, no interesting suspense. In fact, it reminds me of many meetings I've attended (some of which have taken place in Africa); but that doesn't make it interesting writing. The plot doesn't really pick up until the last third of the book. At that point, it moves along at a decent clip.

The prose is okay but nothing special; I made the mistake of listening to this audiobook immediately after Jumpa Lahiri and before Margaret Atwood, two masterful wordsmiths. Lastly, some information at the end of the book leaves the reader feeling that much of the book was completely futile, which felt totally unsatisfying. All in all, the book had its moments and some interesting twists and turns along the way, but I was unimpressed. If you want to read a good Le Carre book about Africa, stick with The Constant Gardner.

Metacritic, a website that collects professional reviews, found the following mix: 6 reviews found the book to be outstanding, 9 favorable, 2 mixed reviews, and 8 unfavorable. So the professionals, on average, liked the book a little better than I did.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by David Oyelowo (published by Hachette Audio). Oyelowo is a British actor of Nigerian descent. He does the African voices well, but some of the European voices sounded strange.

In terms of objectionable content, the book is chocker-block full of strong language and contains a little bit of sex and violence. And, of course, people trying to rip off some Africans at the expense of the lives of others.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage le Carre, September 21, 2006

By	Robert Busko (Waynesville, NC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Mission Song may be destined to be one of le Carre's best. Tightly written with terrific characters, logical story development, and a plot that keeps you guessing, The Mission Song will make you glad you spent the time to read it.

Bruno Salvadore (Salvo to his friends) is a believable character who is sympathetic on one page and exasperating on the other. Born in Africa of a Congolese mother and Irish priest father he was educated in a private school and early on shows a talent for languages. He eventually ends up in England, married, and working a regular job using his skills as a linguist but also works for the British Secret Service. He ends up overhearing a conversation that he would have been better advised to ignore and therein lies his problem.

The story is an examination of the plight of Africa and its people. Controlled by small minded local politicians or criminally insane warlords, the continent is rich in minerals and other raw materials. It is the exploitation of these resources by a fictional syndicate that drives the story.

Wonderfully paced the story is economically crafted with no wasted parts.

My favorite le Carre novel has to be The Spy Who Came In From the Cold with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a close second. The Mission Song is a fitting continuation of a literary career that spans more than three decades.

You'll be glad you read this book.