The Russia House by John le Carre: book review

John le Carre is an inveterate writer, famed for his Cold War (1945-1991) espionage series of novels with spy George Smiley as the lead character. It is hard not to like these books – particularly The Spy who came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

But The Russia House (1989) is not a George Smiley novel. The protagonist, Barley Blair is not a ‘Service’ man – he is an ordinary, likeable, small-time book publisher in Moscow to attend the annual Book Fair. Blair, by his own admission is a heavy drinker, and in an inebriated state while in Moscow he makes a promise to a Soviet scientist Yakov Yefremovich Savelyev – also known as Goethe. 

At another Book Fair, Yekaterina Borisovna Orlova – a woman called Katya – who works for an English language publishing house in Moscow, is looking for Blair. She has, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a knot, a manuscript for Blair – but, Blair is not at the Fair. Katya hands the parcel to a salesman, Niki Landau, who cannot find Blair, and opens the package to find three notebooks. These are the works of the Soviet scientist Goethe.

Landau hands the manuscript to a section of MI6, the British Intelligence – the section called Russia House.

The novel is about the training of Blair to become a British spy to make contact with Goethe through Katya. British Intelligence is not the only country interested in these notebooks – the American CIA agents are involved too. And then Blair goes missing.

The narrator is an agent from the MI6’s Russia House, Horatio Benedict dePalfry – known as Harry Palfrey – who says he knows the full story, directly from Barley Blair, and that “I have tried to tell it to you [readers] here, from his side as well as ours.”

Whereas le Carre’s George Smiley series are intellectual espionage, the Russia House is intellectual literary suspense wrapped around ideologies. For example, in a discussion between Barley and Katya about Russian novels they allude to the Russian nihilist movement (originating in the 1860s) that promotes violence for political change – and one that does not take anything for granted – mentioned in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Katya answers that she is a humanist – taking an ethical stance - while she describes Goethe as an idealist – where reality is fundamentally immaterial.

In the novel we have an ‘idealist’ Soviet scientist – Goethe – whose manuscript reveals his country’s nuclear capabilities and secrets. The relationship between idealism and science is an interesting one especially in terms of absolute values such as ethics, aesthetics, logic, and metaphysics. So the reader gets an insight into the Russian ideologies of Katya and Goethe – and of open and closed societies – but what of Blair and the narrator? Does it explain Blair’s absence? And is the narrator impartial?

As the narrator Palfrey writes, “the elusive truth” is unravelled “in a series of distorted perceptions, which is generally the case in our secret overworld.”