Word: magnus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...father to rest with forgiveness and love, he must first disinter the scoundrel, who died in 1975. Draped in the same checkered past as Ronald Cornwell, Rickie Pym makes darting appearances as an amoral charmer whose lies and bad debts foreshadow the more convoluted betrayals of his son Magnus...
...Magnus Pym shares much of the author's vita, including absentee parents, an unhappy public school education, academic success at Oxford, literary ambitions and a foreign-service job. But there is a speculative quality about the character. What if, Le Carre seems to suggest, David Cornwell did not break away from the murky world of cold war espionage to become an acclaimed writer? Might he have ended up like Magnus, middle-aged and distorted by a past that makes him good at his job but useless as a husband, friend and father...
...ironic burden of being a Perfect Spy is that the distinction is based on distortion. Masters of deceit, according to Le Carre, are borderline psychopaths. One of Magnus' colleagues speculates, "What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination." Pym's first wife Belinda contributes the observation, "He was a new man every day. He'd come home one person, I'd try to match him. In the morning...
...Carre excels at depicting this multitier personality. The most convincing dinner-party chatter, pillow talk and professional banter conceal howling secrets. Magnus' deepest one is that he is a double agent, a fact that becomes apparent about the same time readers realize they have fallen through the civilized surface of the novel. Betrayal comes naturally to Pym, himself the victim of bad faith and disappointments, revealed in flashbacks of youth, student days and beginnings as an operative...
...grim announcement to Parliament, Defense Minister General Magnus Malan described the bombing as "a cowardly deed in the Communist war being waged against South Africa." At week's end no organization had claimed responsibility for the explosion, but South African officials blamed the outlawed African National Congress (A.N.C.), an antiapartheid group that has launched such attacks on urban centers. In the past, the A.N.C. has chosen symbolic targets of white rule, such as police stations and government buildings, but has apparently tried to avoid the random killing of civilians...