Book Review: The Mission Song by John Le Carré - Page 2

His books have never become polemic to the point of lecturing, but they make clear that he is unhappy with the rapacious nature of the world, everything centred around wealth and greed instead of some misty ideal of serving one's country or a least preventing someone else from serving their country at your expense.

So it should be no surprise that in his latest novel The Mission Song, Le Carré is once more showing how money does indeed make the world go round. This time he has chosen the eyes of an innocent for us to see the world through, whose naiveté slips only once or twice, but enough for us to know that he is not quite the naïf he depicts himself to be. Bruno Salvador works as an interpreter, but in the rather unique field of the tribal dialects of Africa.

Bruno is the by-product of a lapse of celibacy on the part of an Irish priest on missionary work in the Congo with the daughter of one of the "parish's" headmen. Bruno's father convinces the young girl that she should surrender her newborn to some good Carmelite nuns, because as he rightly says, a half-breed son would not sit well her father. She did as instructed, and returned to her village where she and the rest of her clan were wiped out in one of the frequent intertribal violent incidents that mark the history of the Congo.

Bruno was raised in the mission where he saw his father every day, although it wasn't until he was ten that he found out that "Father" and father were one and the same, and became fluent in English and French. Because he was obviously a half-caste and different, nobody would play with him and he was dismissed as a metis or worse. It was this isolation and a natural affinity for languages that made him into the translator he became in adult life. He would sit and watch and listen, gleaning tidbits of information about the different languages and the nuances that separated them.

With the aid of the Mission where he was raised, when his father died, he was turned by magic into a British citizen and repatriated "home" to live in a Catholic boys' boarding school. Although details are not supplied, your worst fears are of course true, although Bruno seems somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. But as a result of acquiescence with a certain member of the clergy, he manages to receive quite an extraordinary schooling in all sorts of translation specialties.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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