Tag: John Le Carre

The Night Manager by John Le Carré

The Night Manager by John Le Carré

Not quite 100 pages in on this one, I pronounced the Eight Deadly Words. Sorry, eponymous Jonathan. Even sorrier, Sophie, who lived and died some years before the main action, and who existed to give Jonathan regrets. And perhaps to show that the corrupt Egyptian brothers might be a darker shade of grey than the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/21/the-night-manager-by-john-le-carre/

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

It’s a John Le Carré book, so you know that someone is going to get screwed in the end. In his Cold War books, which were on the whole more subtle in their plotting if not as deft in their characterization, it wasn’t always possible to tell who was doing just what to whom, because …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/18/a-most-wanted-man-by-john-le-carre/

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

This was a fascinating story of a cat and mouse game in which it is never quite clear who is the cat and who is the mouse. It blows to bits the James Bond mythology of what spying is about: it is a dirty, dirty business, and the people who engage in it are hardly …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-by-john-le-carre/

The Mission Song by John Le Carre

In this book Le Carre succeeds in doing what he failed to do in Tinker Tailor: creating characters that the reader actually cares about, as a well as a plot involving a covert operation whose outcome is not merely a an academic move in a geopolitical chess game. I identify in some ways with the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/02/the-mission-song-by-john-le-carre/