Confession Versus Collusion

In Agent Running in the Field (2019), his final novel, John le Carré reprises elements of his post-Cold War critique of transnational espiocratic duplicity and collusion, while also emphasizing the moral imperative of principle-driven constancy and confession as an antidote to the pathology of infection he associates with contemporary geopolitics. His virtuosity in tackling this theme, one also addressed though differently in A Legacy of Spies (2017), validates fellow author Ian McEwan’s assessment that le Carré “will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Britain.

Outlaws and Spies

Outlawry and espionage would seem to be quite different phenomena, rarely discussed together. This book argues that they have something in common - that both involve exclusion from law. Challenging previous readings that view outlawry as a now-superseded historical phenomenon, and outlaws as figures of popular resistance, this book argues that legal exclusion is a longstanding and enduring means of supporting state power. Through close analysis of the literatures of outlawry and espionage, this book reads legal exclusion as a key theme in writing about outlaws and spies from the Middle Ages to the present day, arguing that literature plays an important role in representing and critiquing exclusion from law. The discussion draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Eric Hobsbawm, and engages with a range of primary legal texts from the Middle Ages to the present day. Literary works discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare’s history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story, to contemporary writing by John le Carré, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.

‘We’re Not Policemen’: Espionage and Law in John le Carré

The second part of the book turns to a discussion of extralegality and espionage, beginning with a reading of three novels by John le Carré set against the background of historical events – the construction of the Berlin Wall, the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring, and the practice of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas is disgraced, abandoned, imprisoned, exiled, and finally betrayed, an abjected figure akin to Agamben’s homo sacer, a figure as excluded as any outlaw. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, George Smiley is a liminal figure, an unconstitutional detective investigating a case of treason within what is, in this period, an intelligence agency unrecognised by law. This chapter concludes with a discussion of extraordinary rendition as outlawry in contemporary form via a reading of le Carré’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man. Here we can see the state acting outside of legal constraints via its intelligence agencies, while also seeking to situate particular individuals outside the reach of the law. Together, these forms of exclusion from law constitute new and troubling forms of outlawry that are alive and well in the twenty-first century West.