1-18-07, 9:20 am

The Mission Song By John LeCarré New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2006.

Bruno Salvador, the central protagonist in The Mission Song, the latest thriller from best-selling novelist John LeCarré, is an enthusiastic supporter of Britain, especially the humanitarian sounding goals of the Blair government. Bruno is the son of an Irish Catholic missionary and a Congolese woman. Upon his father’s death Bruno was raised in a Catholic mission in Eastern Congo. After an encounter with a pedophilic priest who realized the boy’s intellectual potential, Bruno is sent to London for education in languages and translation. He is a genius at it and earns a reputation as one of the best at Central African languages.

Like his divided identity, Bruno’s life (like the novel’s subplots) is compartmentalized into three distinct sections. His public life is governed by his loveless marriage to a white women (who uses his racial heritage to punish her wealthy, ultra-conservative father) and corporate jobs translating for multinationals and their overseas clients. Interpretation and translation is a neutral job; it is as though his existence in this compartment is one of simply being a passive objective reflection of the words and emotions of his clients. His personality and identity are non-existent.

Bruno also has a secret life. This compartment is ruled by British secret services. Being an expert in the local languages of Central Africa as well as the customs of its local peoples, Bruno is an invaluable tool for British intrigue in the region. Always able to convince himself that British interests in Africa are humanitarian rather than imperialist, Bruno is a committed servant of the government. He has swallowed wholesale the superiority of Britain and the backwardness of his former country. Like his public life, this compartment is characterized by his neutrality and passivity. He does what he is told, collects a check, and convinces himself it is all for the best. But this neat order, in which he risks nothing and refuses to challenge his perception of reality, is about to change. As the story begins, Bruno opens a new compartment in his life that links him to his African past and to a new sense of himself, but which also threatens to destroy the other two. In addition to lucrative corporate jobs and secret government work, Bruno also occasionally does pro bono work in hospitals, prisons and the like for less-fortunate people who need translators.

At a local public hospital that service immigrant patients, Bruno meets Hannah, a nurse from Eastern Congo. Smitten by her, Bruno begins an affair just as he is asked to do a weekend translation job for the secret service.

The job entails translating for a secret meeting involving Eastern Congolese 'warlords' who might be convinced to back a coup led by a former academic known as the Mwangaze, the enlightened one. Mwangaze’s revolutionary credentials are impeccable, having aligned himself with Patrice Lumumba in the early 1960s and favoring democracy, development, and an end to violence.

But the motives and intentions of this particular event become clearer as Bruno secretly eavesdrops on both the warlords and his humanitarian British superiors. He quickly learns that torture, terror, business interests, and imperialist competition are at the heart of the matter. At first, he views a young Congolese businessman known as Haj as the impediment to democracy and peace, but upon learning the truth, Bruno’s sense of who he is and what he must do is shaken to the core.

The Mission Song is a tale about the British version of the global 'war on terror.' Not unlike the George W. Bush war on terror, the British version has less to do with fighting or stopping terrorist acts than it does with promoting corporate interests in different regions of he world. In this case, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But the novel poses an extraordinarily new version of the typical tale of violence and imperialism. In this version, Black people are agents of resistance who operate not necessarily in an equal terrain of power with British spies and mercenaries but as actors who may have the power to outwit them and foil their schemes. They aren’t simply background figures or objects of European or North American humanitarian charity. The only question is how successful will they be?

If you haven’t grabbed a copy of this fast-paced thriller yet, you are missing out on one of the better books of 2006.