In The Mission Song, we see John Le Carre trying out a new stylistic approach to his material, specifically the use of a first-person narrator, Bruno Salvador, aka Salvo. We also see a continuation of the post-Cold War interest in Africa that has already manifested itself in The Constant Gardener, and in the shady areas where government and big business interests overlap.

Salvo is a hot-shot interpreter, the son of an Irish missionary and a Congolese mother, and his Catholic upbringing in the Congo has made him fluent in English, French, Swahili and a number of of the more obscure Congo dialects. As such, he is in high demand, and as the novel opens he is already in the pay of the British intelligence services on a part-time basis, working in their ‘Chat Room’ listening in on telephone calls and bugged meetings. Offered the opportunity to act as face-to-face interpreter on a deniable operation, he drops everything and finds himself being whisked off to an unidentified island in the North Sea that is playing host to a very irregular conference.

WARNING: Spoiler ahead

We hear Salvo’s account of his experiences at the conference – he starts out as a wide-eyed innocent, trusting to the good intentions of the shadowy Syndicate and the Congolese warlords. The matter at hand is, in effect, a coup in the mineral-rich Eastern Congolese region of Kivu, with the white-haired chieftain Mwangaza as the apparently benevolent figurehead. As Salvo spends time at the conference table and manning the mics in the basement during the breaks, it quickly becomes apparent that the people of Kivu are very low down the list of priorities. His exposure to torture and double-dealing leaves him in no doubt where things stand, and he impulsively smuggles some materials back home that should have been destroyed.

The rest of the novel focuses on Salvo’s attempts to forestall the coup, working with the new love of his life, Hannah, who is also Congolese. His familiarity with the tradecraft of secret intelligence work is exceeded by his trust in the British Establishment, and he exposes himself and Hannah to great risks in his increasingly desperate attempts to find someone who shares their point of view. The failure of the attempted coup, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Simon Mann’s abortive attempt to seize power in Equatorial Guinea, may or may not have been down to Salvo’s agitation.

I greatly enjoyed The Mission Song – Salvo is an enaging, if not always particularly plausible, narrator, and his quirky style of speech keeps things moving along nicely. At times, his naivety can stretch credibility slightly, but I found myself willing him to succeed despite it all. The use of the Congo as the backdrop for the novel, although never the actual setting, seems well researched and Le Carre is careful not to go in to too much detail about the numerous factions in that atrocious conflict. Though it’s hard to believe this is from the same author that brought us George Smiley and Karla, in my opinion that’s no bad thing.

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