I just read that the soon-to-start-shooting movie of Our Kind of Traitor sets the initial encounter between our two innocent Brits and the hulking Russian banker in Morocco, not on the books island in the Caribbean. I wonder why and what other liberties they will take. Not that it matters much, I suppose. I recently re-read this book and must say it is superb, a real pleasure -- the dialog and characters. It brims with humanity. I wonder if the author got to hang out with Russian bankers, and if so, where? There was an op-ed piece in the NYTimes the other day in which a British guy sketched the UK as pretty much what le Carré describes, staying afloat on a tide of Russian money, no questions asked: Britain, open for business, no longer has a “mission.” Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh. Britain’s ruling class has decayed to the point where its first priority is protecting its cut of Russian money — even as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that, in the 21st century, what matters are banks, not tanks. [...] In the austerity years of zero growth that followed the 2008 financial crash, this new source of vast wealth could not be resisted. Tony Blair is the latter-day embodiment of pirate Britain’s Sir Walter Raleigh. The former prime minister now advises the Kazakh ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev on his image in the West. Mr. Blair is handsomely paid to tutor his patron on how to be evasive about the crackdowns and the mine shootings that are facts of life in Kazakhstan. This is Britain’s growth business today: laundering oligarchs’ dirty billions, laundering their dirty reputations. [...] But London has changed. And the Shard — the Qatari-owned, 72-floor skyscraper above the grotty Southwark riverside — is a symbol of that change. The Shard encapsulates the new hierarchy of the city. On the top floors, “ultra high net worth individuals” entertain escorts in luxury apartments. By day, on floors below, investment bankers trade incomprehensible derivatives. Come nightfall, the elevators are full of African cleaners, paid next to nothing and treated as nonexistent. The acres of glass windows are scrubbed by Polish laborers, who sleep four to a room in bedsit slums. And near the Shard are the immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, who broke their backs on construction sites, but are now destitute and whiling away their hours along the banks of the Thames. The Shard is London, a symbol of a city where oligarchs are celebrated and migrants are exploited but that pretends to be a multicultural utopia. Here, in their capital city, the English are no longer calling the shots. They are hirelings.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:55:16 +0000
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