Clearly, Le Carre has become a cynical and bitter old man, which is a shame. Where his George Smiley and Mr. Pym spy novels glided effortlessly through time sequences, it was stilted and awkward in this one. The detail the author spends on the two main characters is wasted when he jumps, sometimes decades, to future scenes seemingly without context.
But the worst of his sins is the pointless injection of his own anti-American views on Iraq and post 9/11 policy. If anybody can pull off a classic Cold War-in-the-new century novel, it would be Le Carre. Instead he chose to salt the last third of the book with useless shots at the Bush and Blair administrations, which only detracted from the already fractured plot.
It's sad to see probably the greatest writer of spy fiction of all time fall so far. |
Absolute Friends Books In Print, Audio Books.