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Fiction. Literature. Suspense. Thriller. HTML: Full of politics, heart, and the sort of suspense that nobody in the world does better, The Mission Song turns John Le Carre's laser eye for the complexity of the modern world on turmoil and conspiracy in Africa. Abandoned by both his Irish father and Congolese mother, Bruno Salvador has long looked for someone to guide his life. He has found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Bruno's African upbringing, and fluency in numerous African languages, has made him a top interpreter in London, useful to businesses, hospitals, diplomats � and spies. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility known as the "Chat Room,"Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, and snatched voice mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference between Central African warlords, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain bring peace to a bloody corner of the world. But then he hears something he should not have... By turns thriller, love story, and comic allegory of our times, The Mission Song is a crowning achievement, recounting an interpreter's heroically naive journey out of the dark of Western hypocrisy and into the heart of lightness..… (more)
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Salvador, a "top translator" of English, French and several African languages, leading a carefully arranged life, is passionate about his African homeland, and, as the book opens, has just fallen in love with an African woman. He is given the opportunity to translate for a mysterious syndicate holding a conference at a concealed location to arrange an event that affects the Congo. As he translates, he pieces together the plan and attempts to interfere with it.
Salvador encounters quite a few of the sort of characters Le Carre writes in his sleep - spell-spinning high-flyers and silent tough guys. But he also meets one slightly more original young man who might be his more worldly doppelganger.
There are, not unusually, father and son themes worked out in the story. The one element that I felt was handled a bit clumsily was the love affair.
I would agree that Salvador's final actions are not guided by Smiley-like sagacity, but Salvador is impulsive, and for all of his ability to translate words and nuance to others, he is singularly unable to hear and understand the people who hold his own future in their hands.
Half-caste Bruno Salvador prtly hails from teh Eastern Congo, and has a very skilled facilty with languages that make him ore thanjust a translater but a valued interpreter. A Catholic background has prepared him to serve his country and so he offers his skills to HMG in
A very ntypical read, this is le carre in is lightest and most accessible manner, A cheerful happy dialog keeps the plot roling along, much unlike his more normal heavier works. It also means there is very little intregue. Told in a fairly strict first person view the observations and African backgrounds are charming, but verall could have done with quite a bit more depth.
The first issue I have
Which brings me to the second problem I have with the book. There's barely a character to like in it. The main character is a pompous ass who is as thick as a stump. You know those horror movies where the audience is yelling, "Don't go down into the cellar alone, you idiot!" Well, those moments abound in this book. You would think that Bruno would realize by...oh...say the third time he decides that this person involved in the conspiracy must be honorable and so he'll confess that he eavesdropped, only to get burned, that maybe he's a total incompetent when it comes to judging people? The majority of the remaining characters being the bad guys, about the only character I would want to associate with would be Hannah, a bit player.
Beyond this, the book doesn't seem to be able to figure out what it wants to be. As I noted, the blurb calls it a novel of someone discovering his beliefs mixed with a thriller with a little romance.
Calling it a thriller is a large overstatement. Once we get to it, we have a few minutes of thriller material, then we have a long wind down with absolutely no tension whatsoever. The bad guys don't even threaten our hero, for goodness sakes! The reader sees every situation coming from pages away.
Saying there's a romance in it also overstates the case. Basically, the romance can be summed up thusly: (married) protagonist tells us he met a nurse at the hospital last night and then spent the night having sex, protagonist has almost-hallucinatory dreams about her for a couple days, couple meets again and each declares undying love to the other. There's not a whole lot of depth beyond that.
Finally, the part about Bruno turning from the West and discovering his African sensibilities—the problem is that the author has never made us see any conflict between these two viewpoints. Bruno isn't presented as a jingoistic fellow—my country right or wrong—who, upon learning about the conspiracy to rape the Congo suddenly discovers another side of himself. No, he's presented as a rather ordinary man who is anxious to serve his adopted Great Britain but, upon learning that non-governmental forces in Great Britain are the bad guys, decides to oppose them. Where's the conflict? It's pretty much what one would expect of any person.
It was the only audio book on a long drive, so I didn't stop listening. If I had, this wouldn't even have rated 2 stars. I've never managed to pick up a le Carré in the past but I always assumed that I would be pleased once I got around to it.
I was quite wrong.
Not everything is gone with cold war as The constance gardener proved it, but Smiley's books are surely more compelling than this one!
Anyway, why have an interpreter at the conference table, interacting with the delegates, at all? In real life they sit anonymously in little glass boxes and talk into microphones.
Le Carré can do better than this, and you wouldn't have thought that he has any need to churn out pot-boilers at this stage in his career.
As you can probably tell by that lead in, I was actually rather disappointed. While sympathetic to Africa and its problems the book is not `vintage' le Carre and proved one of the very few of his works that will not likely be read again (and again) and not recommended to my sons to add to their collections. It is always a conundrum this; when authors, needing to develop their skills and stretch the genre, explore new characters, offer a fresh approach, and then their regular readership - almost guaranteed by the previous work - then miss the well-loved characters, or an echo of the ideas from the previous books.
Recognizing that conflict then, and stepping aside from my usual expectations of John's work, it is of course extremely well crafted fiction and it may lead novel readers into the main body of his work with its demands for a dedicated, thoughtful, reader.
I enjoyed this story of a naif Afro-British interpreter who wants to serve God and country by helping the British secret service with difficult translation problems, only to find out that their God and country are not his.
The
I did love Salvo's observations of London society and his scathing assessment of the U.K.'s meddling in international affairs -- something that I am sure reflects leCarre's own opinions, given his position of other conflicts in other novels (such as the Afghan/Iraq wars in Absolute Friends). Perhaps a more careful editing of this novel would have sped it along a bit more.
I listened to this book on audiotape, and I loved, absolutely loved, the narrator's voice. Him, I can recommend wholeheartedly!
What first got my interest was the fact that the protagonist was an
Yes, it is a bit of a removal from his earlier novels, but that is precisely why I liked it! It shows that LeCarre can write outside of his usual USA-British-Russia spy novels.
Lovely writing and took me at a olympic bobsled speed throughout the novel.
Classic le Carre` with the very strong main character... a lot of subtlety during the negotiation scenes... lots of digressions and backstory and character speeches... I love le
As far as the audio-book went, I started off the first disc thinking I would not like the narrator David Oyelowo, but he ended up doing a nice job... definitely got stronger as the story went on... nice job with different voices and some excellent accents, especially as there were many different ones... his voice for Hannah's friend Grace was great, sounded like another human being.
I have a policy of reviewing every book I read, so I'm catching up on a few that never got reviewed because I never finished reading them. The Mission Song falls into that category.
I treasure my books on audio CD as I can listen to them easily in the car, so it
I'd never read a Le Carre novel before but The Mission Song seems to be one of his less favoured books. So this, along with the poor narration convinced me that life was just too short, and this was going to be one of my rare abandoned audio books. I'm not sure I even completed the first CD.