I just read the transcript of what I think is a podcast by Al Mohler, the Baptist leader. Part IV was about John le Carre, who died a few days ago. The novelist and former spy wrote many celebrated stories, several of which I have begun reading. The New York Times noted that le Carre used "moral ambiguities" to push the story forward. Mohler became fixated on that, roughly interpreting that as "moral relativism". I know that Mohler is a culture warrior, maybe above all, but I do not find moral relativism in le Carre's protagonist George Smiley. Moral ambiguity does not equal moral relativism. What Smiley finds--and the reader is invited to contemplate--is moral inconsistency. I think it is brilliant of the author to invite us inside a story of good and evil, to consider that good and evil coexist within each of us. A John le Carre novel is about the struggle within, more than the struggle without. That's something in general that a Christian should be able to understand.
But the scandal of the evangelical mind, to plagiarize a title, is that art itself has been subordinated to the missionary impulse. Evangelicals make bad art, and enjoy bad art, because there is an apparent inability to take the transcendentals of the good, the true, and the beautiful on their own terms. Now John le Carre is simply a popular novelist; I won't necessarily argue that he represents any form of high art. But we have to do better than this, Reverend Mohler. One of the things that I enjoy reflected in Sir Alec Guinness's acting at the end of the miniseries for "Smiley's People," is that George can't even enjoy his greatest victory, because he broke a man to do it. He violated his own principles to achieve the end that Britain's intelligence service needed. That doesn't seem like moral relativism to me.
I don't know about David Cornwell's soul, and I won't presume either way. I do know that it is incumbent upon me as an act of charity not to reduce a work of art produced by him for my own purposes.
To some extent, we ought to let art be art. The moral inconsistency of the characters in le Carre's most famous trilogy is disquieting. It's not celebrated; in fact, that's how a moral absolutist should feel, in a story like this. Moreover, any Christian, no matter how firm his commitment and resolve, should recognize people that will crack, if you pull the right lever, or apply the right pressure. Isn't that the story of all of us?
I don't want to beat up on Mohler too badly, but I just had to get that out. Le Carre is quickly becoming my favorite novelist. Maybe I just didn't like the potshots at his memory, especially in the service of taking some cultural shots at the New York Times.
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