Who's Left to Play the Great Game?

Fred Kaplan's review of the new thrillers by John le Carré and Joseph Finder in last week's Slate, which I only got around to reading today, put me in mind of Charle McGrath's similar piece in the magazine section of last Sunday's Times. (Given the differing lead times at their publications, I don't think anybody cribbed from anybody else, and it's not like the ideas discussed below are so unique that [at least] two people wouldn't have thought of them independently. Hell, you were probably thinking the same thing and just didn't have a column to tell the world about it.)

McGrath's surprised there aren't more thriller writers dealing explicitly with post-9/11 geopolitics; "they're writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages." After considering that maybe it's just a case of not enough time going by for authors to get their bearings, he raises another theory: Many of the best thrillers deal in ambiguity and relativism, but in these times, "we desperately want clarity and understanding, not more suggestions that 'intelligence' is an oxymoron, and we seem to need to believe that our enemies are fundamentally different from ourselves."

Mind you, I suspect there are thriller writers setting their stories explicitly in the war on terror. It's just that they're not "literary" types, but paperback writers turning out mass market originals of the sort he probably never reads and rarely even sees outside an airport. And they purport to offer exactly the sort of clarity and difference-affirming the "literary" thrillers eschew.

Kaplan's not surprised, per se, but he certainly agrees with McGrath that the genre doesn't seem to have risen to the occasion yet. He's definitely underwhelmed by le Carré's Absolute Friends, and to some degree by the author himself: "One problem here is that, like the aging Willy Loman, le Carré doesn't know the territory." (I'm pretty sure, by the way, that he's conflating Willy Loman and Harold Hill.) Joseph Finder, meanwhile, is doing not uninteresting things with the corporate espionage thriller, but ultimately Kaplan finds his story equally implausible. Where McGrath laments that the thriller writers aren't addressing the world of today, Kaplan is wondering whether those writers even have what it takes...and where McGrath sighs that nonfiction books just aren't as compelling as a good novel, Kaplan concludes:

Today's newspaper readers know quite a lot of inside dope about this once-cloistered world. What they don't know, they can infer, extrapolate, or fantasize well enough on their own. Which is why, if someone ever does write another great spy thriller, it will likely be found on the nonfiction shelf.

Which makes me want to send him Robert Baer's Sleeping With the Devil and get his reaction.