[issybird]

Originally Posted by gmw

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?

My memory of the timeline is a little shaky and the book has returned to the library so I can't check. Wasn't this after Giles set Toby on Quinn? Although once we find out more of Giles's backstory, I wonder that he'd want to rattle the cages at all (the decision he came to himself, eventually, but I think it would have been sooner).

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.

The parallel irony just occurred to me in regard to Toby. I did snicker at the name "Ethical Outcomes" as it clearly implies unethical means, but that also applies to Toby. I think that was very well done by le Carré; I was just slow on the uptake. That's the big question; when do the ends justify the means? We root for Toby and against Crispin, but Crispin & Co. have the opposite take.

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?

But Quinn had already screwed up and he still had a soft landing.

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.

I think it's the personal element that makes it interesting. There's nothing at all engaging about Crispin's machinations. It occurs to me that the flip side of the bad guys being all bad is that they were also much more polished. They recovered their fumbles quickly and handled them (and hence the three years until Toby and Kit were back in the UK). The three good guys screwed up, but again, that's human.