I can accept Suzanna as a metaphor, but what exactly is Toby?
Quote:
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His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing: rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
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I like "solitary decider". It begs the question: what right does Toby have to make the choices he was this early in the story? At least Quinn, for all that he is painted as a thoroughly dislikeable character, has some claim on authority.
At that point in the tale Toby had committed treason without much justification. He'd been spying on secret government meetings without permission and for no better reason than his boss had chosen to leave him out. Okay, so given Toby's position this did inspire suspicion, but is suspicion sufficient cause to break the law?
2013 was the year of Edward Snowden. This book was published in 2013, so the timing seems somewhat fortuitous to have published a book that skirts some of the same territory.
The right and wrong of Toby's situation this early in the story is interesting, although sadly not something that this book does a lot with. le Carré doesn't offer us any ambiguity, the bad guys are painted as all bad, and the screw up results in deaths of (apparently) truly innocent people. We're never left in any doubt that someone screwed up and the author wants us to accept that someone should be held accountable for the screw-up. But who and how much seem left deliberately vague.
Actually, I got the impression that Quinn was quietly and subtly held accountable and pushed off to the side. How much punishment was he due? How much punishment was applied to the mercenaries that pulled the trigger? The story gives us no way of knowing, but the behaviour was unprofessional (and not really credible). However, it was still a government sanctioned operation which seems to rule out a murder charge, so how much punishment would have been enough?
Eventually we get to all the crap with Jeb and Kit and Toby, but this is all
after the questionable attempts of those three to do something more about an incident three years after the fact. I say "more" because actions probably were taken, just that neither we, nor those three characters, know what those actions were and that's not something the story seems to consider.
In addition to Toby's spying on Quinn, there are so many other interesting issues buried in here: the privatisation of national security; whether there was ever any reason for this to be a military operation; that Quinn may have sanctioned an extraordinary rendition to be carried out by American mercenaries on British soil; that British soldiers were discharged before being used for the operation. But all these things, even the deaths of the anonymous woman and child, get brushed aside as we hear about Jeb and Kit and Toby. And their actions seemed personally motivated rather than actually caring.