As with all John Le Carré writing The Mission Song merits close attention a good memory, note taking and a map of central Africa and Democratic Republic of the Congo with an overview of the recent history together with a second read to appreciate the story integrity and the depth of characterisation. I purchased a half price hard cover 2006 first edition from the Asda Bolden and if I read from cover to cover I did not remember the ending although I recalled some aspects when I set about reading properly over a week ago.
I immediately identified with the hero of the story, Bruno Salvador, Salvo to friends, because he is the illegitimate son of an Irish Catholic priest but there the similarity ends because he was acknowledged by his father who raised him for ten years until he died in South Kivu in the Eastern Congo, a land of lakes and volcanic mountains, emerald pasture land and luscious fruit groves according to Le Carré. He was born at the Carmelite convent in Kisiangani, previously Stanleyville the provincial capital of Tshopo, the largest city in the tropical woodlands of the Congo and the third largest in the country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The official language is French but Swahili and Lingala is the most common tongue of the people together with countless dialects which Salvo picked during his most tender years and which became a mixture of his good fortune and downfall in equal measure. Kisiangani is an inland port 1300 miles from the Ocean and became the commercial capital of the north and the birth place of Patrice Lumumba.
It was between my 60th and 65th birthday that I first knew that my father was of a Maltese family with a known history on the Island of several hundred years whereas Salvador’s father was more colourful, the union of an Irish soldier and 14 year Normandy peasant girl who had spent his childhood between the two countries thus speaking French as well as Irish. I sometimes think I should have also become a priest as seemed destined in my childhood, a man apart from sexuality at least that is the official nature of the calling. For one reason not made clear Salvo’s father did become a missionary priest, a calling for which he appears to have been suited except for the passionate nature of a sexual kind.
We learn that with the outbreak of the First World War he made his way to the Congo and joined a group of Friars attempting to bring Christianity to the two hundred odd tribes in the east of the territory. Of his mother, his father had once whispered that she was a village headman‘s daughter, tall and beautiful and that he was born out of love.
She escaped the convent where she had given birth leaving her Salvo behind and went back to her people where unfortunately the whole village was massacred by another tribe. In disgrace the Catholic Church as its wont sent his father first to Madrid and then to Marseilles before allowed to return to the Congo was he retrieved his three year old child from the orphanage to have with him. It was during the following seven years that accompanying his father on his mission work he was able to learn the variety of languages and meanings from the children he met on the travels.
Following the death of his father then in his seventies which again brings comparison with my own who was nearly the age of my mother he found himself branded the secret child within the Catholic church community and which also mirrors my own experience hidden from the extended Gibraltarian family and friends for reasons which I assumed until my own sixtieth year was just from my illegitimacy. It was only then I learned my true identity. Salvo was given his two identities when ten years of age. The first as described was African and Catholic and the second in preparation for banishment to England was an UK Irish seafaring citizen with the unlikely surname of Salvador selected by the Mother Superior who was Spanish and with the support of the British Consul in Kampala he was on his way for an education with care among the downs of Sussex
It was here he had the good fortune to come under the wing of a Brother who sensed that his ability to speak French, English Swahili and Langali with all the dialects would be his making and then introduced him to his wealthy sister Imelda and the experience of holidays at her estate in Devon which included a croquet lawn and a paddock for retired pit ponies. She also funded the private tutoring which led him to the school of Oriental and African Studies in London where he graduated first class in African Languages and culture and then achieved a Masters in Translation and Public Service Interpreting.
Salvo making something of his talents can be said to have been down to the Catholic Church and particular individual who felt a sense of responsibility rather than guilt and shame because of the circumstance of his parenting. I have previously reported on the head of the catholic preparatory school whose letter, the first I had ever received, when I moved to the Independent Catholic senior school said that I was child of God which made my birth mother angry, taking the letter from me which I never saw again. It was then a Jesuit modern history teacher who inspired me to understand what the second world war was all about which led me to nervously approaching the local public librarian to read some of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials on the concentrations camps which he suggested,
We first meet Salvo in London aged 28 years where he is married to the beautiful upper crust wife called Penelope aged 32, yes four years his senior, and who is a rising star of tabloid journalism whose mother is an active Tory and father a top lawyer with a family home in the depth of Surrey. In fact Salvo is already late for a special drink’s party followed by DJ dinner of recognition and celebration for his wife’s journalistic achievements when he gets the call which is to change his life.
Unsurprisingly he had gained well paid work as an interpreter for the police and the courts, for the health and immigration services and for his country more overtly through the Minister of Defence which necessitated signing the Official Secrets Act about the only thing I also have in common with Monsieur Le Carré, and his Salvo.
The reason that Salvo was late was only ostensibly the need to be at the bedside of a Rwandan from the Congo who appeared to have escaped from an immigrant detention centre who was found dying on Hampstead Heath from an immediately unknown infection, but more because of a black countrywoman from his birth land with whom he had immediately connected with her soul as well as her body, and in a way in which only served to underline the gulf between him and his childless by choice wife.
He was summoned by phone, by one Mr Anderson, a man in his late fifties, married with children, a baritone in some choir at his home town in Sevenoaks with an office at the MOD and in charge of the listening and interpreting unit in the bowels of the Whitehall building. He was told the money was exceptional, that the work was in the national interest and concerned the future welfare of his birth land.
Because of his origin and background it could not be said that Salvo had the welfare of his birth land foremost in his daily consciousness although this was something which Degree nurse Hannah was constantly reminding him of during their brief relationship to date as the patient, the Rwandan had a hatred of her people.
Most educated and informed Westerners of a certain age are familiar that in Rwanda a small Africa country compared to that of the two Congo Republics that the minority Tutsi had dominated the overwhelming majority of Hutu for centuries before the 1959-1962 of displaced Hutu power lasting 30 years. The majority took power from the minority. The Ugandans then supported a move back of the displace Tutsi and this led to Hutu planning genocide killing of the Tutsi at a rate of 10000 a day, some 400 an hour so that roads were filled with slaughtered bodies reducing the population from over a million to 300000 creating thousands of raped HIV widows and an overall population with 40000 orphans with 85000 older children the head of families in the community.
The United Nations belated intervened giving power to the Tutsi and displacing hundreds of thousands of Hutu into the Congo and other neighbouring countries.
It was in the Eastern Congo and Kivu area of Salvo and Hannah that other nations coveted their mineral wealth particularly coltan which is used by the cellular phone industry and began to financially support the various factions, tribal and geographical based, in an attempt to gain authority to plunder the riches underground
At present my understanding is that there is now a Hutu based power group self styled Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda which is at war with the government of the Democratic Republic. In addition there is a Goma city based group sympathetic to the cause of the Banymanulenge Tutsi, who is opposed, understandably, by both the Government and the Rwandan Hutus and also the United Nations forces trying to establish ongoing peace in both countries. People have killed in number, fled, change sides often at the time elections are held with allegations of corruption and worse. Military forces from Angola have become involved in the ongoing conflict although this appears restricted to advisers (of the kind employed by the USA in Asia, middle and central Americas in the past and Europeans in Libya most recently We are in the age of ex professional soldier mercenary employed by agents and used by governments to bypass the niceties and complexities of democratic and Parliamentary government.
Salvo had his reservations about taking on the special financially lucrative assignment which meant abandoning and embarrassing his wife by his non appearance, deserting the dying Rwandan and the emotional and sexual comforts of Hannah and a commitment to help at a Court hearing after the weekend, which Anderson assured, was already covered.
But if he wanted continuing work and the approbation of his government’s Ministry then he had no alternative but to accept the arranged lift not to the MOD but to a flat 22a in South Audley Street where he was told to ring the bell and advise that he had a parcel for Harry.
It is here he found his Mr Anderson and an assistant called Bridget who measured him up for new clothes which turned him into looking like an English school master than international top notch interpreter and a new identity which confirmed his birth place as central Africa, with Brian for Bruno and Sinclair for Salvador and a set of printed name and address cards which did not disclose the name of the Channel Islands registered company for which he worked bringing the latest horticultural devices to the Third and Fourth Worlds.
Salvo was also told that his assignment was deniable as anything to do with the MOD and if things went wrong he was on his own, His contact was to be someone called Maxie who in turn worked for Phillipe who was agent and not a government employed. Now while I the reader noted this carefully and the alarm bells, Salvo appears awed by his new circumstance and clearly did not register that the warning was absolute and unequivocal. Le Carré has his character failing to grasp the nature of the project and reflecting his still naive, idealistic and trusting personality.
I too have found myself in situations where there is a sense of unreality and is this really happening to me as he was then taken, equipped with a small overnight bag to Berkeley Square and area familiar to me because this is where in 1959 I attended a one month sales training school with forty or so others for British Olivetti and ended the course heading the list of successful candidates based on four weekly examinations and an overall course assessment rating. I was clearly destined for selling greatness but alas the new office standard manual machine had too light a touch for the dozens of mainly young women who I persuaded to take a free trial use of the machine, achieving more than anyone else of the new intake but where even with the help of my supervisor not one could be sold and although I was not alone in this I took it personally and eventually resigned to shortly become a non violent actionist against weapons of mass destruction.
Salvo or Brian as he had become was told to wait outside a room where a conference was being held and where he was able to distinguish the language as English but laced with Indian sub continent, Euro-American and African Colonial, all which should have registered on Brian that although his mission was sponsored by the UK, using an agency, there was international involvement.
It was while he speculated about ethnicity of those engaged behind the closed door that he missed the entrance of Maxie, a somewhat manic gentleman who remind him of figures in his past and who proclaimed he was late because he had got a puncture in his push bike. Whereupon Maxie enquired if Brian knew what the caper was about and surprised that the old fart Anderson had not told him. Maxie then established that Brian’s skill extended beyond French Lingala and Swahili to Bember, Shi, Kinyarwanda and more.
Brian is then introduced to a hero of his, one Lord Brinkley of Sands, former Labour Minister, entrepreneur and defender and champion of all things African. The significant point here is that Maxie did not know the name of the person dominating the room until pointed out by Salvo and that the man was clearly put out at being identified by the newcomer as he was introduced for his interpreting skills. He was still pondering why according to Maxie the recognition had scared the shit of the Lordship when he was taken to join a people carrier and was whisked with a short distance of his home to a helicopter and then across London to Luton Airport.
He had already left messages for Penelope explaining he had been called away on a special assignment but at the airport he managed to contact the hospital where he learned the patient had died, that Hannah was upset and not available, His inability to connect with the two beings who mattered most to him, I suspect added to the sense of unreality he was experiencing although this is my personal viewpoint and not explicit in the writing.
In addition to two pilots the party numbered nine and during the journey where most settled down to sleep but he learned that they were on their way to a small island in the North Sea where they were to meet with a small group of gentlemen from the Congo who were officially elsewhere and where they had six hours to help them say yes to each other.
Maxie wanted to know what food was available then ordered that the York ham, salmon sides, cold fillet of beef and magnum of Champagne should would wait for the return journey and those who wished could partake of nearly cold Chow mein,
It was while attempting to eat the meal he was asked on his knowledge of military terms and technical terms and assisted in explaining that the Congolese would use the nearest colonial language to their everyday experience if there was no equivalent in their particular vernacular, something which I could identify with have been brought up in the part of a household which spoke Gibraltarian which is predominantly southern Spanish with English mixed in unless you were also Maltese in which that was also mixed in with the Spanish and sometimes with the English.
It meant that you had a peasant level vocabulary unless you were sent for education to Spain, England and Malta and in significantly fewer instances to Italy, France and Muslim North Africa. And where me, alas despite the Spanish, Maltese, Italian and English background was brought up only English speaking while the adults spoke Gibraltarian Spanish so they thought I would not know what they said to each other. But like Salvo I listened and commenced to understand only to be told to keep stum when Gibraltarian family and friends called. Salvo was quickly told to restrict his understanding and speaking abilities to the basic languages of the visitors so they would think they would be safe to talk in other tongues although knowing their conversations would be likely recorded. It was during the journey that Maxie presented the big lie to Salvo.
He admitted that that Congo had been fucked by the Arab slavers, then by fellow Africans, then by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the French, The Belgium’s, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the golf companies and the mineral companies, half the world’s carpetbaggers and their own government in Kinshasa and any minute they are going to be fucked by the oil companies. This first part was all true of course. Then came the lie “Time they had break and we are the boys to give it to them.” They landed
I immediately identified with the hero of the story, Bruno Salvador, Salvo to friends, because he is the illegitimate son of an Irish Catholic priest but there the similarity ends because he was acknowledged by his father who raised him for ten years until he died in South Kivu in the Eastern Congo, a land of lakes and volcanic mountains, emerald pasture land and luscious fruit groves according to Le Carré. He was born at the Carmelite convent in Kisiangani, previously Stanleyville the provincial capital of Tshopo, the largest city in the tropical woodlands of the Congo and the third largest in the country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The official language is French but Swahili and Lingala is the most common tongue of the people together with countless dialects which Salvo picked during his most tender years and which became a mixture of his good fortune and downfall in equal measure. Kisiangani is an inland port 1300 miles from the Ocean and became the commercial capital of the north and the birth place of Patrice Lumumba.
It was between my 60th and 65th birthday that I first knew that my father was of a Maltese family with a known history on the Island of several hundred years whereas Salvador’s father was more colourful, the union of an Irish soldier and 14 year Normandy peasant girl who had spent his childhood between the two countries thus speaking French as well as Irish. I sometimes think I should have also become a priest as seemed destined in my childhood, a man apart from sexuality at least that is the official nature of the calling. For one reason not made clear Salvo’s father did become a missionary priest, a calling for which he appears to have been suited except for the passionate nature of a sexual kind.
We learn that with the outbreak of the First World War he made his way to the Congo and joined a group of Friars attempting to bring Christianity to the two hundred odd tribes in the east of the territory. Of his mother, his father had once whispered that she was a village headman‘s daughter, tall and beautiful and that he was born out of love.
She escaped the convent where she had given birth leaving her Salvo behind and went back to her people where unfortunately the whole village was massacred by another tribe. In disgrace the Catholic Church as its wont sent his father first to Madrid and then to Marseilles before allowed to return to the Congo was he retrieved his three year old child from the orphanage to have with him. It was during the following seven years that accompanying his father on his mission work he was able to learn the variety of languages and meanings from the children he met on the travels.
Following the death of his father then in his seventies which again brings comparison with my own who was nearly the age of my mother he found himself branded the secret child within the Catholic church community and which also mirrors my own experience hidden from the extended Gibraltarian family and friends for reasons which I assumed until my own sixtieth year was just from my illegitimacy. It was only then I learned my true identity. Salvo was given his two identities when ten years of age. The first as described was African and Catholic and the second in preparation for banishment to England was an UK Irish seafaring citizen with the unlikely surname of Salvador selected by the Mother Superior who was Spanish and with the support of the British Consul in Kampala he was on his way for an education with care among the downs of Sussex
It was here he had the good fortune to come under the wing of a Brother who sensed that his ability to speak French, English Swahili and Langali with all the dialects would be his making and then introduced him to his wealthy sister Imelda and the experience of holidays at her estate in Devon which included a croquet lawn and a paddock for retired pit ponies. She also funded the private tutoring which led him to the school of Oriental and African Studies in London where he graduated first class in African Languages and culture and then achieved a Masters in Translation and Public Service Interpreting.
Salvo making something of his talents can be said to have been down to the Catholic Church and particular individual who felt a sense of responsibility rather than guilt and shame because of the circumstance of his parenting. I have previously reported on the head of the catholic preparatory school whose letter, the first I had ever received, when I moved to the Independent Catholic senior school said that I was child of God which made my birth mother angry, taking the letter from me which I never saw again. It was then a Jesuit modern history teacher who inspired me to understand what the second world war was all about which led me to nervously approaching the local public librarian to read some of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials on the concentrations camps which he suggested,
We first meet Salvo in London aged 28 years where he is married to the beautiful upper crust wife called Penelope aged 32, yes four years his senior, and who is a rising star of tabloid journalism whose mother is an active Tory and father a top lawyer with a family home in the depth of Surrey. In fact Salvo is already late for a special drink’s party followed by DJ dinner of recognition and celebration for his wife’s journalistic achievements when he gets the call which is to change his life.
Unsurprisingly he had gained well paid work as an interpreter for the police and the courts, for the health and immigration services and for his country more overtly through the Minister of Defence which necessitated signing the Official Secrets Act about the only thing I also have in common with Monsieur Le Carré, and his Salvo.
The reason that Salvo was late was only ostensibly the need to be at the bedside of a Rwandan from the Congo who appeared to have escaped from an immigrant detention centre who was found dying on Hampstead Heath from an immediately unknown infection, but more because of a black countrywoman from his birth land with whom he had immediately connected with her soul as well as her body, and in a way in which only served to underline the gulf between him and his childless by choice wife.
He was summoned by phone, by one Mr Anderson, a man in his late fifties, married with children, a baritone in some choir at his home town in Sevenoaks with an office at the MOD and in charge of the listening and interpreting unit in the bowels of the Whitehall building. He was told the money was exceptional, that the work was in the national interest and concerned the future welfare of his birth land.
Because of his origin and background it could not be said that Salvo had the welfare of his birth land foremost in his daily consciousness although this was something which Degree nurse Hannah was constantly reminding him of during their brief relationship to date as the patient, the Rwandan had a hatred of her people.
Most educated and informed Westerners of a certain age are familiar that in Rwanda a small Africa country compared to that of the two Congo Republics that the minority Tutsi had dominated the overwhelming majority of Hutu for centuries before the 1959-1962 of displaced Hutu power lasting 30 years. The majority took power from the minority. The Ugandans then supported a move back of the displace Tutsi and this led to Hutu planning genocide killing of the Tutsi at a rate of 10000 a day, some 400 an hour so that roads were filled with slaughtered bodies reducing the population from over a million to 300000 creating thousands of raped HIV widows and an overall population with 40000 orphans with 85000 older children the head of families in the community.
The United Nations belated intervened giving power to the Tutsi and displacing hundreds of thousands of Hutu into the Congo and other neighbouring countries.
It was in the Eastern Congo and Kivu area of Salvo and Hannah that other nations coveted their mineral wealth particularly coltan which is used by the cellular phone industry and began to financially support the various factions, tribal and geographical based, in an attempt to gain authority to plunder the riches underground
At present my understanding is that there is now a Hutu based power group self styled Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda which is at war with the government of the Democratic Republic. In addition there is a Goma city based group sympathetic to the cause of the Banymanulenge Tutsi, who is opposed, understandably, by both the Government and the Rwandan Hutus and also the United Nations forces trying to establish ongoing peace in both countries. People have killed in number, fled, change sides often at the time elections are held with allegations of corruption and worse. Military forces from Angola have become involved in the ongoing conflict although this appears restricted to advisers (of the kind employed by the USA in Asia, middle and central Americas in the past and Europeans in Libya most recently We are in the age of ex professional soldier mercenary employed by agents and used by governments to bypass the niceties and complexities of democratic and Parliamentary government.
Salvo had his reservations about taking on the special financially lucrative assignment which meant abandoning and embarrassing his wife by his non appearance, deserting the dying Rwandan and the emotional and sexual comforts of Hannah and a commitment to help at a Court hearing after the weekend, which Anderson assured, was already covered.
But if he wanted continuing work and the approbation of his government’s Ministry then he had no alternative but to accept the arranged lift not to the MOD but to a flat 22a in South Audley Street where he was told to ring the bell and advise that he had a parcel for Harry.
It is here he found his Mr Anderson and an assistant called Bridget who measured him up for new clothes which turned him into looking like an English school master than international top notch interpreter and a new identity which confirmed his birth place as central Africa, with Brian for Bruno and Sinclair for Salvador and a set of printed name and address cards which did not disclose the name of the Channel Islands registered company for which he worked bringing the latest horticultural devices to the Third and Fourth Worlds.
Salvo was also told that his assignment was deniable as anything to do with the MOD and if things went wrong he was on his own, His contact was to be someone called Maxie who in turn worked for Phillipe who was agent and not a government employed. Now while I the reader noted this carefully and the alarm bells, Salvo appears awed by his new circumstance and clearly did not register that the warning was absolute and unequivocal. Le Carré has his character failing to grasp the nature of the project and reflecting his still naive, idealistic and trusting personality.
I too have found myself in situations where there is a sense of unreality and is this really happening to me as he was then taken, equipped with a small overnight bag to Berkeley Square and area familiar to me because this is where in 1959 I attended a one month sales training school with forty or so others for British Olivetti and ended the course heading the list of successful candidates based on four weekly examinations and an overall course assessment rating. I was clearly destined for selling greatness but alas the new office standard manual machine had too light a touch for the dozens of mainly young women who I persuaded to take a free trial use of the machine, achieving more than anyone else of the new intake but where even with the help of my supervisor not one could be sold and although I was not alone in this I took it personally and eventually resigned to shortly become a non violent actionist against weapons of mass destruction.
Salvo or Brian as he had become was told to wait outside a room where a conference was being held and where he was able to distinguish the language as English but laced with Indian sub continent, Euro-American and African Colonial, all which should have registered on Brian that although his mission was sponsored by the UK, using an agency, there was international involvement.
It was while he speculated about ethnicity of those engaged behind the closed door that he missed the entrance of Maxie, a somewhat manic gentleman who remind him of figures in his past and who proclaimed he was late because he had got a puncture in his push bike. Whereupon Maxie enquired if Brian knew what the caper was about and surprised that the old fart Anderson had not told him. Maxie then established that Brian’s skill extended beyond French Lingala and Swahili to Bember, Shi, Kinyarwanda and more.
Brian is then introduced to a hero of his, one Lord Brinkley of Sands, former Labour Minister, entrepreneur and defender and champion of all things African. The significant point here is that Maxie did not know the name of the person dominating the room until pointed out by Salvo and that the man was clearly put out at being identified by the newcomer as he was introduced for his interpreting skills. He was still pondering why according to Maxie the recognition had scared the shit of the Lordship when he was taken to join a people carrier and was whisked with a short distance of his home to a helicopter and then across London to Luton Airport.
He had already left messages for Penelope explaining he had been called away on a special assignment but at the airport he managed to contact the hospital where he learned the patient had died, that Hannah was upset and not available, His inability to connect with the two beings who mattered most to him, I suspect added to the sense of unreality he was experiencing although this is my personal viewpoint and not explicit in the writing.
In addition to two pilots the party numbered nine and during the journey where most settled down to sleep but he learned that they were on their way to a small island in the North Sea where they were to meet with a small group of gentlemen from the Congo who were officially elsewhere and where they had six hours to help them say yes to each other.
Maxie wanted to know what food was available then ordered that the York ham, salmon sides, cold fillet of beef and magnum of Champagne should would wait for the return journey and those who wished could partake of nearly cold Chow mein,
It was while attempting to eat the meal he was asked on his knowledge of military terms and technical terms and assisted in explaining that the Congolese would use the nearest colonial language to their everyday experience if there was no equivalent in their particular vernacular, something which I could identify with have been brought up in the part of a household which spoke Gibraltarian which is predominantly southern Spanish with English mixed in unless you were also Maltese in which that was also mixed in with the Spanish and sometimes with the English.
It meant that you had a peasant level vocabulary unless you were sent for education to Spain, England and Malta and in significantly fewer instances to Italy, France and Muslim North Africa. And where me, alas despite the Spanish, Maltese, Italian and English background was brought up only English speaking while the adults spoke Gibraltarian Spanish so they thought I would not know what they said to each other. But like Salvo I listened and commenced to understand only to be told to keep stum when Gibraltarian family and friends called. Salvo was quickly told to restrict his understanding and speaking abilities to the basic languages of the visitors so they would think they would be safe to talk in other tongues although knowing their conversations would be likely recorded. It was during the journey that Maxie presented the big lie to Salvo.
He admitted that that Congo had been fucked by the Arab slavers, then by fellow Africans, then by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the French, The Belgium’s, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the golf companies and the mineral companies, half the world’s carpetbaggers and their own government in Kinshasa and any minute they are going to be fucked by the oil companies. This first part was all true of course. Then came the lie “Time they had break and we are the boys to give it to them.” They landed
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