True Believers

...But politics soon ominously reappear...

...A Saint, More or Less will probably be read as a purely historical novel, but while no one is bumed as a witch nowadays, the parallels between our times and Nicole's are too obvious for Grunwald to have to belabor...

...and even more important, we still look for objects of faith, and for systems of thought that can subsume our doubt and our fear...

...That is the purpose and nature of miracles__Frauds deceive...

...But the unstoppable march of the American hyperpower in the years following 1989 is frightening to both Ted and Sasha...

...It is her doubt, not Barbe's spiritual certainty, that is attractive to modern relativists, and her "miracles" are human rather than merely miraculous, merely supernatural...

...Without giving away too much of the plot, it is safe to reveal that the Iraq War and the so-called War on Terrorism enter into the story, and that President George W Bush's gang and its allies are seen as being terrifyfngly efficient in achieving their objectives, not bumblers, as so many persist in painting them...

...Grunwald capped an impressive journalistic career by serving from 1979 to 1987 as editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., and subsequently was the U.S...

...But Barbe's last years are not an unalloyed triumph: As a simple novice in the convent she founded, she suffers humiliation from an arrogant abbess and behaves with a grace and humility she never quite showed in her previous life...

...Ted's happy family life is doomed, obviously...

...ambassador to Austria, the country he emigrated from as a boy...

...On Fiction True Believers By Brooke Allen John le Carre's classic The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is still, 40 years on, many readers' choice as the best spy thriller in the English language...

...He wins a scholarship to Oxford where, like le Carré himself, he studies German literature...

...Kate, who has always been active in the Labor Party, becomes a rising star in the pragmatic "New Labor" that will one day triumph with the ascendance of Tony Blair, and Ted is inevitably recruited by MI5 because his job, accompanying theater and dance troupes on tours behind the Iron Curtain, is just too good a cover...

...But Nicole, Grunwald indicates, deserved it as much or more...

...But Ted, despite his second, German, soul, remains too English to be fully seduced...

...he asks, with all the pained authority of one tall man empathizing with another...

...Disgusted by Partition and his country's role in the debacle, he imbues his son with contempt for Lord Louis Mountbatten, Clement Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps, Winston Churchill, and every other author of Colonial policy...

...Grunwald quotes George Bernard Shaw's comment on St...

...POLITICS might be called the modern, Western version of religion...

...Only God," one of his characters philosophically remarks, "knows who his saints are...

...It will pick it dry...

...As Sasha, the most brilliant and persuasive of his new friends, puts it: "You are English, and for you, all life is a silly accident...

...Do we not still look for miracles, saints and devils, if, perhaps, by other names...

...His father, an alcoholic, washed-up infantry major in the North West Frontier Province, resigned his British commission and offered his services to the new Pakistani Army...

...He lived at night, as you probably know...

...Ted was born on August 15,1947, the first day of Pakistan's independence...

...And who wouldn't...

...The very same traits that accounted for her initial success—intelligence, intuition and true spirituality—are seen as indicators of demonic possession...

...his suppression of his own wise self as an acolyte to this dangerous idealist is, on some level, nonsensical...

...When Ted is arrested and deported for political activity, he loses touch with Sasha...

...More or Less (Random House, 236 pp., $23.95), set in France during and after the Wars of Religion, we encounter characters tormented by religious doctrine just as le Carre's are by the political variety...

...His subsequent tomes lengthened, acquired multiple layers of artistic and political meaning, and sometimes of pretension—but in essence remained spy thrillers...

...Ted's loyalty to Sasha as a friend is fine in itself...

...There is apt to be greater anger against them than against people who are outside the tribe, or faith, entirely...

...Ted works as a character, being just perverse and self-destructive enough to make us like him, but Sasha is inherently unsatisfactory: Idealism is attractive at 20, acceptable at 30, scarcely so at 40...

...He is "not persuaded by intellectual argument," hearing it as "music he can't play rather than the iron logic it professes to be...

...Barbe, widowed, goes on to found the French Order of Discalced Carmelites, achieves beatification and, in 1791, sainthood as Sister Marie of the Incarnation...

...And, as Grunwald asks us, "are we not still inspired—or tormented—by religion...

...A shocking number of "important," prize-winning novels nowadays are awkward and amateurish, revealing exposition in the clunkiest, most self-conscious manner...

...Men are especially bitter when they believe that their God is being betrayed by their own...

...Her love of God and her empathy with the sick and the destitute bring her friends...

...Nicole, a poor orphan from a troubled background, possesses talents that would, in a less superstitious age, be celebrated instead of feared...

...One of the questions the novel poses, a perennial puzzle that will forever remain unanswered and unanswerable, is "whether religion was using politics as a weapon or politics using religion as a pretext...

...Those who fail to understand the peculiar venom that existed between the Catholics and Protestants of Barbe and Nicole's time might consider the equally arbitrary hatred between the Sunnis and Shi'ites of our own: Family quarrels, after all, are the most violent...

...At first, having performed a few apparently miraculous healings, she is taken up by Paris' Catholic grandees, including Barbe and her husband, but eventually she offends the imperious Barbe and is suspected of being possessed by the Devil...

...Nicole ultimately returns to the obscurity from which she originally emerged...

...A Saint, More or Less covers the years from 1594 until about 1620, and focuses on two women—both actual historical figures—whose lives fatefully intersected: Barbe Acarie, a wellknown and respected upper-class Parisian, and Nicole Tavemier, an obscure girl from the provinces who makes a name in Paris as a faith healer and popular preacher...

...Oh dear me, no...

...Joan's miraculous deeds, and for modern readers this should be sufficient: "A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith...

...Here is Ted in a shameless, self-parodic mode as he delivers his spiel on Mad Ludwig to the Anglophone tourists of Munich: "So what does he do, this handsome, overtall, sensitive, abused, proud young man who believes he was appointed by God to rule...

...A lonely visionary in a lousy world...

...As Grunwald intelligently observes, unbelief is an indivisible part of belief: Special "doubts and torments" and "spiritual tribulations" seem "so often to beset believers...

...Nicole's claim to elevated status comes more from her skepticism than her conviction, and we are moved by her humility: "I serve God very imperfectly," she says at the end, "but I must keep trying...

...But one of the lessons life should have taught the middle-aged and experienced Sasha is that a search for purpose and fulfillment is not apt to be successful— that fulfillment arrives on its own terms and in its own, usually secret, way...

...her gift as a popular preacher, unacceptable in a woman at that time, excites suspicion...

...Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes," he says, "but by the liberal guilt of the affluent...

...Human motivations and interests are seldom and maybe never pure, as our present-day wars of "religion," in the Middle East and elsewhere, clearly demonstrate...

...The King of Escape Artists, if you like...

...In Berlin the student masses are in permanent movement against the forces of counterrevolution," a pretty German girl lectures him...

...Sasha is smart enough to work out this scenario, and principled enough to see it as his business—his mission—to resist it, as he has resisted other perceived evils...

...Even though he patronizes Ted and nabs his girlfriend, Ted responds to his essential vulnerability and attaches himself to the German, playing Sancho Panza to Sasha's very quixotic Quixote...

...Grunwald describes "a strange world in which saints and angels were as real as kings and peasants, if not more so, a world in which God spoke to people and the Devil lurked around every comer...

...Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion in a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome...

...What does he do when he is systematically stripped bit by bit of the power he was born to...

...As a student in Berlin, Ted gets caught up in the revolution of the '60s...

...The city of the Spartacists and the capital of the Third Reich has rediscovered its revolutionary destiny...

...An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle...

...He is seedy, happy and at peace—at least until Sasha shows up again...

...Le Carré might just be the most technically assured writer in the language, and Absolute Friends swoops with virtuosic ease as it moves from decade to decade and from continent to continent...

...Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place...

...Eventually the major wears out his welcome in Pakistan and returns to England with Ted, now a teenager...

...To possess another language is to possess another soul," his teacher informs him, quoting Charlemagne...

...Since le Carré has subordinated almost all of Absolute Friends to the relationship between Ted and Sasha, the novel succeeds, or fails, on the strength ofthat relationship...

...Barbe and Nicole, as depicted by Grunwald, were two of the more interesting of them...

...He is at least subliminally aware that his newfound political commitment is more about his personal search for connection than it is about conviction...

...Did she deserve sainthood...

...Certainly...

...But I am German, and for me, if it has no logic it is meaningless...

...The book covers half the 20th century and takes us from Pakistan to England to Germany...

...Have you read Horkheimer...

...Sasha, who as a German is only too familiar with methods for duping a gullible electorate, understands the technique and describes it well: "This is a war of lies...

...and it seems that Ted's investigations of Schiller and Goethe do indeed provide him with a window into the German soul, ardent, reforming and theoretical...

...The King of Dreamers is what I prefer to call him...

...In Dmitri, Sasha believes he is offering Ted "everything you need: money, a purpose, a fulfillment of your life...

...The religious conflicts and traumas of the era produced a great many mystics, self-appointed saviors, and hysterics (AJdous Huxley's famous The Devils of Loudun deals with the same subject in scholarly rather than fictional form...

...In Henry Grunwald's third book and first novel, A Saint...

...Absolute Friends offers a gripping read at the hands of a consummate professional, and a refreshingly uncompromising political vision...

...Ted goes along with Amory's philosophy of enlightened patriotism, and with the fall of the Iron Curtain it does indeed seem that he has sacrificed his family life for a good cause...

...A Saint, More or Less is his first novel...

...They were complex women whose genuine piety was inextricably tied up with personal ambition and vanity...

...Palaces with attitude...

...Le Carré has a spectacular ear for dialogue, too...

...Think of us as one tribe," says one of Grunwald's characters...

...The actions of Ted, a fine character, are only credible if we find Sasha to be a fine character as well...

...Yet he is stupid too, stupid in his adherence to stark notions of good and evil, power and submission: as much in love with authority as at war with it, as Mundy has the wit to recognize...

...in a man of over 50 it is inexcusable...

...Perhaps...

...We're Carmelites," Ted's spymaster, Amory, tells him...

...He has been chosen, as it turns out, by Sasha, now a double agent, disabused of his previous revolutionary illusions...

...He makes a new life with a Turkish woman and her young son, rescuing them from destitution, and has an absurd job as a tour guide at one of Mad King Ludwig's palaces...

...His protagonists, however, have occasionally been baffled idealists, unable or unwilling to accept the depths of human corruption in their fruitless search for something they might believe in...

...But when the captains and the bullshit artists depart, we'll be the boys and girls who made the difference...

...We can't talk about what we do, we get no visible promotion, normal life goes for a Burton...

...Its hero, Ted Mundy, like Salman Rushdie's Saleem Sinai, is one of Midnight's Children, and as such a rather obvious personification of postimperial confusion...

...Orthodoxy and the various ways of lapsing from it are construed in a literal rather than theoretical manner—people then were actually thought to be possessed by the devil—but punishment by the French religious establishment was no more dire than that meted out by latter-day inquisitors like the Stasi...

...Ejected from the country he loves, caught in the twilight of puberty, dragged night and day toward a guilty country he has not seen but must now call home, Mundy undergoes his first exposure to the radical reappraisal of Colonial history...

...And that's why personally I try not to call Ludwig mad...

...He has written two memoirs, One Man's America and Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight...

...Although the end of the Cold War deprived him of the East-West moral and geographical axis most of us think of as le Carré country, he has never quite abandoned the genre...

...The country is still suffering the terrible upheavals of the 16th-century Wars of Religion, although the one-time Protestant Henri IV is now on the throne and has begun to bring a measure of stability to his embattled country...

...Illusions of power...

...If you have not read Horkheimer's Twilight, you are ridiculous...

...Answer: He builds himself a string of fantasy castles...

...Giving up his half-baked radicalism, he drifts happily enough into a position with the British Council and marriage with a pleasant schoolteacher, Kate...

...Our wives have to pretend they've married failures and some believe it...

...Sasha asks Ted...

...Ted and Sasha, the central figures of le Carre's latest novel, Absolute Friends (Little, Brown, 383 pp., $26.95), are examples...

...Sasha has found a new focus for his passionate belief, a Messianic philanthropist named Dmitri, and he is determined to draw Ted into Dmitri's dubious plans to save the world...

...Didn't like people on the whole, certainly not the ladies...

...By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed...

...If his post-1989 novels have not equaled the best of the earlier ones, works like The Tailor of Panama and The Constant Gardener have nevertheless proved that corporate skullduggery, among other subjects, offers plenty of material for the talents he honed on high politics...

...Sasha, a Saxon Lutheran from East Germany, is at the eye of the student revolution's storm...

...What it lacks in flash and technical expertise it makes up for in life experience, and it will richly reward those who pick it up...

...and Sasha is, alas, only an abstraction...

...Our politicians He to the press, they see their lies printed and call them public opinion...

...But as a novel it falls short of le Carre's ambitions...

...If le Carre's symbols are a little obvious and his rhetoric a little heated, his technical skill is pure joy...

...Le Carré is a fiercely articulate man, bristling with outrage over the state of the world...

...His German friends have no doubts about their new religion...

...The less power he's got, the bigger the illusions he builds...

...As is to be expected of a first novel, it is neither polished nor sophisticated...

...The friendship, born from a mutual feeling of parental and national betrayal, and forged in the intensity of '60s Berlin, is the pivotal fact and event of the novel...

...DISCARDED by the Secret Service, Ted washes up in Munich...

...but it is both thoughtful and wise...