Remember John Le Carré? He is the writer who brought us those memorably seamy novels, many of them later turned into successful films, on the moral ambiguities of the Cold War, when agents who looked nothing at all like Sean Connery gradually lost any sense of what they were fighting for, which side they were on, and even what might constitute a meaningful act. Perhaps their most attractive trait was their ability, even while engaging in blackmail, extortion and other kinds of nastiness, to recognise in their opposite number a brother-in-arms. Playing the game was the thing. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an outcome for which the real-life equivalent of Smiley and the sorry band of trilbies in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) can take little credit, Le Carré has had to look elsewhere for murk.
Perhaps it isn't entirely surprising that his new source of inspiration should be the multinationals and their ability to extend their activities across national borders seemingly at will. The Constant Gardener (2001), the most popular of his post-Cold War novels, has just been released in a film version directed by Fernando Meirelles, best known for his supercharged film …