Security-service narratives are constructed to serve political neatness rather than accuracy

Evidence

Some of the most striking parts of the novel are where Le Carré reveals how the narratives relied on by the security services are often incomplete, incorrect, hypothesized—constructed to answer the needs of neatness and political policy. The novel is made up of stories—and of stories within stories—reflecting the spy’s trade but also acting to expose the potential abuse of language in the interests of power. In this context, the “truth” comes to be what the important people are predisposed to believe. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding concern in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist about who controls official narratives of threat. — connects to: Threat narratives flourished in official channels despite being wholly unfounded — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1224; The security state formally recruited fiction writers to imagine threats
• SEED: An essay angle: how intelligence ‘truth’ operates as a closed interpretive loop where data is fitted to policy conclusions, mirroring Islamophobic fiction’s circular logic.