Agent Running in the Field - John le Carré Audiobook

Written by John le Carré
Read by John le Carré
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: October 22, 2019
Duration: 09:33:00

“I’m a field man,” says Nat, a Secret Intelligence Service agent, “not a desk jockey, not a social carer.”

Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.

No sooner has Nat sunk into this forgettable ambit than several disquieting developments arise. Florence, who’s his nominal second-in-command, angrily quits over the unexplained cancellation of a project she’s designed, spearheaded, and pitched to the powers that be. Sergei Kusnetsev, a Russian defector who’s become a sleeper agent for Her Majesty’s Government, is contacted by Anastasia, a Russian agent who presumably either wants to put him to work, if she trusts him, or to expose him, if she doesn’t.

Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all. Seeing the world as he knows it–not the new world order or the special relationship, but his own faded patch of it–threatened from every corner, Nat, determined to assert himself one last time, hatches a rickety plan to keep the pot from boiling over. A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author

Agent Running in the Field is a chilling portrait of our time, now heartbreaking, now darkly humorous, told to us with unflagging tension by the greatest chronicler of our age.