Le Carré Versus Bush

John Le Carré, author of The Spy who Came In From The Cold and a host of other Cold War novels, has released a stunning new novel that angily lambasts the neo-conservative agenda for global empire.

Le Carre calls this an "extremely delicate point in all our histories." The latest novel follows a Times article 12 months ago entitled "The United States of America has gone mad". At that time he wrote:

"The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams.... As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

"How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear."

In the new book, Absolute Friends, one character says:

"There's a new Grand Design about in case you haven't noticed. It's called pre-emptive naivety, and it rests on the assumption that everyone in the world would like to live in Dayton, Ohio, under one god, no prizes for guessing whose god that is."

Another character asks:

"What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design?"

Read more here or order now at Amazon.com.