John le Carré - The Mission Song

The premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time

Time

One of those writers who will be read a century from now

Robert Harris

The great master of the spy story the constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practising

Financial Times

The master

Henning Mankell, Daily Telegraph

Our greatest living master of espionage fiction Le Carr is one of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-mans land

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

Le Carr is not just todays gold standard, but the best there ever was

The Huffington Post

No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded

Scott Turow

Le Carr is one of the best novelists of any kind we have

Vanity Fair

He can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale

Susan Hill, Sunday Times

A masterly understanding of moral complexity the signature clarity of his prose is matched only by the distinctive murkiness of what it describes

Guardian

Brilliant, morally outraged works that mine rich veins of post-Cold War venality

Seattle Times

The worlds greatest fictional spymaster

Newsweek

John le Carr was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

John le Carr

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THE MISSION SONG

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Hodder & Stoughton 2006

Published in Penguin Books 2018

Copyright David Cornwell, 2006

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration by Matt Taylor

ISBN: 978-0-241-32240-6

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. Marlow

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

My name is Bruno Salvador. My friends call me Salvo, so do my enemies. Contrary to what anybody may tell you, I am a citizen in good standing of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and by profession a top interpreter of Swahili and the lesser-known but widely spoken languages of the Eastern Congo, formerly under Belgian rule, hence my mastery of French, a further arrow in my professional quiver. I am a familiar face around the London law courts both civil and criminal, and in regular demand at conferences on Third World matters, see my glowing references from many of our nations finest corporate names. Due to my special skills I have also been called upon to do my patriotic duty on a confidential basis by a government department whose existence is routinely denied. I have never been in trouble, I pay my taxes regularly, have a healthy credit rating and am the owner of a well-conducted bank account. Those are cast-iron facts that no amount of bureaucratic manipulation can alter, however hard they try.

In six years of honest labour in the world of commerce I have applied my services be it by way of cautiously phrased conference calls or discreet meetings in neutral cities on the European continent to the creative adjustment of oil, gold, diamond, mineral and other commodity prices, not to mention the diversion of many millions of dollars from the prying eyes of the worlds shareholders into slush funds as far removed as Panama, Budapest and Singapore. Ask me whether, in facilitating these transactions, I felt obliged to consult my conscience and you will receive the emphatic answer, No. The code of your top interpreter is sacrosanct. He is not hired to indulge his scruples. He is pledged to his employer in the same manner as a soldier is pledged to the flag. In deference to the worlds unfortunates, however, it is also my practice to make myself available on a pro bono basis to London hospitals, prisons and the immigration authorities despite the fact that the remuneration in such cases is peanuts.

I am on the voters list at number 17, Norfolk Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, South London, a desirable freehold property of which I am the minority co-owner together with my legal wife Penelope never call her Penny an upper-echelon Oxbridge journalist four years my senior and, at the age of thirty-two, a rising star in the firmament of a mass-market British tabloid capable of swaying millions. Penelopes father is the senior partner of a blue-chip City law firm and her mother a major force in her local Conservative Party. We married five years ago on the strength of a mutual physical attraction, plus the understanding that she would get pregnant as soon as her career permitted, owing to my desire to create a stable nuclear family complete with mother along conventional British lines. The convenient moment has not, however, presented itself, due to her rapid rise within the paper and other factors.

Our union was not in all regards orthodox. Penelope was the elder daughter of an all-white Surrey family in high professional standing, while Bruno Salvador, alias Salvo, was the natural son of a bog Irish Roman Catholic missionary and a Congolese village woman whose name has vanished for ever in the ravages of war and time. I was born, to be precise, behind the locked doors of a Carmelite convent in the town of Kisangani, or Stanleyville as was, being delivered by nuns who had vowed to keep their mouths shut, which to anybody but me sounds funny, surreal or plain invented. But to me its a biological reality, as it would be for you if at the age of ten you had sat at your saintly fathers bedside in a Mission house in the lush green highlands of South Kivu in the Eastern Congo, listening to him sobbing his heart out half in Norman French and half in Ulstermans English, with the equatorial rain pounding like elephant feet on the green tin roof and the tears pouring down his fever-hollowed cheeks so fast youd think the whole of Nature had come indoors to join the fun. Ask a Westerner where Kivu is, he will shake his head in ignorance and smile. Ask an African and he will tell you, Paradise, for such it is: a Central African land of misted lakes and volcanic mountains, emerald pastureland, luscious fruit groves and similar.

In his seventieth and last year of life my fathers principal worry was whether he had enslaved more souls than he had liberated. The Vaticans African missionaries, according to him, were caught in a perpetual cleft stick between what they owed to life and what they owed to Rome, and I was part of what he owed to life, however much his spiritual Brothers might resent me. We buried him in the Swahili language, which was what hed asked for, but when it fell to me to read The Lord is my Shepherd at his graveside, I gave him my very own rendering in Shi, his favourite among all the languages of the Eastern Congo for its vigour and flexibility.