Absolute Friends

by John Le Carré

Hardcover, 2004

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Collection

Publication

Little, Brown and Company (2004), Edition: 1st, 455 pages

Description

Fictio Thrille Historical Fictio HTML:Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict. After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life-this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the age… (more)

Media reviews

In this book John le Carré, the pro's pro, seems determined to resume his own apprenticeship as a writer, to shuck off the last stubborn vestiges of public-school cleverness. The rant at the end of the book is the proof. He does the most un-English thing imaginable: he loses his head while all
Show More
about him are keeping theirs.
Show Less
1 more
Lecturalia
Una nueva muestra del mejor le Carré, en forma de salvaje fábula sobre la hipocresía de la política, aunque no exenta de ternura, y a la vez un canto a la amistad que sobrevive en un mundo despersonalizado y sin rumbo. Con su habitual maestría, le Carré relata la historia de dos amigos a lo
Show More
largo de cincuenta y seis años: Ted Mundy, hijo de un militar británico, y Sasha, hijo de un pastor luterano proveniente de la Alemania del Este. Ambos estudian en Berlín Oeste y se reencontrarán primero en la guerra fría y años más tarde en un mundo amenazado por el terrorismo y sojuzgado por la política americana de la guerra global.
Show Less

User reviews

LibraryThing member kambrogi
A fine read for Le Carre's fans. This is a more direct and immediate story than his [A Perfect Spy], with many of the same elements but perhaps less depth of character. It has le Carré’s characteristic lonely spy, an ethical man who finds himself adrift and conflicted in a corrupt world, at odds
Show More
with his handlers while sacrificing his personal life for his work. In this one, we have the life story of a man born to a British military man serving the Raj in Pakistan at the time of Partition. After a troubled youth, the protagonist finds one true friend, an association that ultimately carries them through post-WWII Germany, the Cold War, and into the even darker world of Bush-era neo-con intrigue, much of it perhaps a parallel for le Carré’s own history, certainly a parallel for the world as we have known it over the last 50 years. As in [The Constant Gardner], the author’s theories on the contemporary military-industrial agenda are scary, and worse: they’re believable.
Show Less
LibraryThing member tommi180744
Two completely different characters meet become firm friends, fall out, reappear in each others lives through several decades and they're always in the core of the Cold War spy game. Through that period their personalities are well described and believable. However that does not hold in the
Show More
post-Soviet era when they are again at opposite ends of the spectrum of political certainties: Somehow, and this is never explained the 2 are selected for their roles of a lifetime to inadvertently justify Neo-con terror in response to Fundamentalist terror that enables the great Pentagon war machine and their greedy side-kicks the Armaments industry and Washington Political power-brokers to have their gory way in Iraq (?). At least I think that was the intended fictional expose within this narrative: Unfortunately the plot is stymied by only the 2 characters really having any productive direction and input: thus, when in the last chapters suddenly an omniscient chap turns up who dupes both into that 'role' he has so little depth of character and background to his remarkable position it is quite incredible to believe the 2 fell for his act. A failure of narrative that in turn makes the end to this story is so farcically implausible I guess Le Carre just got tired and wanted it over with.
Show Less
LibraryThing member malcrf
Boring, lightweight, fluff. Empty cliched characters, fantastical plot, detached, empty prose. Not bad enough to stop reading, but I wish I'd not started it.
LibraryThing member MikeBruscellSr
Although I have been what I describe as a "serious reader" for nearly sixty years, "Absolute Friends" was my introduction to LeCarre'. Naturally, I was familiar with his work, but for whatever reasons, had not read anything he had penned. Having found a hardcover copy for $1. at a roadside
Show More
bookstore, I decided I would delve in, with the thought "What the Hell, never too late". In retrospect I wish I had passed on what I thought to be a bargain for the "master's work". Prompted by a personal commitment I made decades ago to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, typically until the very last word, I forced myself to complete what was, in toto, a miserable chore. Thinking I was going to read a fine piece by a supposed master of the spy genre, I found myself suffering through a disjointed narrative where it was often difficult to distinguish between the thoughts of the main characters and the relentless political ranting of the author. Reading this book is akin to eating cardboard, the taste is bad and worse, there is little in it to satisfy the appetite.
Show Less
LibraryThing member gregorymose
I'm always amazed by le Carre. Every time, I think I'm picking up a spy book, something light, and every time I find myself being drawn in not by action or suspense, but by solid and vivid characters, people who stick with me long after I've put the book down and forgotten the clever plot twists.
Show More
Absolute Friends is yet another such book. Wonderful.
Show Less
LibraryThing member readingwithtea
"Leaving the envelope to mature for a week or two, therefore, he waits until the right number of tequilas has brought him to the right level of insouciance, and rips it open."

Ted Mundy, Pakistan-born English major's son, Germanophile and student rebel, has just about settled into mediocrity at the
Show More
British Council when a trip in his guise as head of Overseas Drama and Arts (particular responsibility: Youth) becomes an exercise in secret police evasion. A figure from his past appears and he is recruited into double agency.

I got to page 260 out of 400 of this. The first 200 pages were really promising - fascinating character development, a cold open that leaves us desperate to get back to it, great student riot atmosphere... and then we get into the spying proper and it bored me to anger. Seriously, I got so angry with the dull plot, dire characters and chronically self-indulgent writing ("redux" 4 times in 2 pages??) that I decided I would rather play Bubble Shooter on my phone than continue reading it. Scathing criticism indeed.

The writing is exceptional and so consistent that I struggled to find a quote for the top of this review and shan't waste more time trying to find any more - rather than good writing with exceptional one-liners, this is excellent writing with an unfortunate dollop of smug. The page that finally made me lose my temper was one in which Ted was named "Mundy redux" 5 times over a double page. I don't know what redux was supposed to mean, given that we are already so hopelessly entrenched in Ted's multiple personalities, but it struck me as so pompous, so "I require my readers to have advanced degrees, otherwise they're not good enough", that I was genuinely angry.

The characters are impossible to relate to - Ted is dull, mediocre, apathetic; no wonder his wife finds someone else. Sasha is fiery and contrary, but implausibly so. And no one else gets much of a look-in, as this is about the two absolute friends and not anyone else. So character development for the support cast is woeful.

And as for the plot - Ted's childhood: fascinating. Student days: engrossing. Berlin riot participation: page-turning. Settling into middle-class mediocrity in Britain/spying: urgh. Bubble Shooter was more exciting.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Pferdina
An enjoyable novel from the master of spy novels. Following Ted Mundy's life: born in Pakistan, moved to Britain, then became a student radical in Germany, escaped back to Britain then the U.S. for awhile, eventually returned to Britain. At this point, Ted acquires a wife, a child, a steady job,
Show More
and a second existence as a double-agent for the British, working with an old, fanatic friend from his Germany days. After the Cold War ends, everything changes. What is an old spy to do after the enemy retires?
Show Less
LibraryThing member name99
As always, Le Carre does not disappoint. There is the usual gripping story, along with the usual fascinating background information.

Le Carre is clearly very very angry about what has happened in the west in the past few years, the creeping fascism of Bush and friends, and is not scared to focus on
Show More
it here.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mpicker0
Did not care for the style at all... too hard to follow. I forced myself to finish it.
LibraryThing member p_linehan
At first this seemed like one of LeCarré’s usual spy books, with a lost boy hero who had a bad father and got caught up in the Cold War. Yet as the book moved to its final act it becomes clear that this is a political polemic against America’s war on terror. All the criticisms that the Iraq
Show More
War was nothing but lies come to roost by the end of the book. The British, as America’s junior partners don’t come out lightly either. I found myself wanting to scream out at Ted Mundy to get away, to stand up for himself. His fate, however, is to be an “absolute friend”.
Show Less
LibraryThing member leehopkins
Of all of Le Carre's stunning work THIS book is my favourite. All of Le Carre's trademark characterization and local 'colour' is here, of course, but he tells his tale with such aplomb, such mastery of pace and tension, that I couldn't put it down -- I stayed up all night to finish it.
LibraryThing member myfanwy
After watching The Constant Gardner and hearing good things about The Tailor of Panama, I decided I really ought to read a John Le Carre novel. On the recommendation of my roommie, I picked up a recent one called Absolute Friends.

This is the life story of Ted Mundy, failed student, employee, and
Show More
husband but excellent spy. I suppose my frustration with this book began because I expected it to be a spy novel. For the first half of the book, it simply told Mundy's backstory, a series of meanderings through school, travel, a brief stint of activism in the 60s. Mundy isn't a particularly admirable character. He follows leaders because they are magnetic, not because he's especially attached to their ideals. Finally, after 200 pages he is invited to the service and you realize that his meandering history actually makes him perfect for the role of double agent during the cold war, traveling back and forth between East and West Berlin. He lives a secondary life which he can tell no one of except for his close friend and confidant, his mirror image double agent on the other side.

What happens next? Well, we certainly don't hear about spying. We hear about how his marriage fails and how he's never promoted in his cover job, how he lets go of his son for the sake of his wife's career, how he begins to spend time at peep shows just to waste the hours between spying and how he is casually tossed aside when the Cold War is over. He is truly a pawn of higher forces, and watching him get trod upon is just so depressing. In the end he is set up in a sting operation for no use whatsoever except to increase support for American military hegemony. Two somewhat idealistic but hopeless has-been agents brutally murdered to prove a point.

Now that I think about it, all three Carre pieces (Tailor, Gardner and Absolute Friends) involve the destruction of a normal Joe's life by careless greater powers. Are all Carre's books like this? At least with Clancy you get some of the ins and outs of espionage. Here it was merely the after-effects, the seediness. I even found the style tiresome -- this constant patter of present tense which would be thrilling if it described action, but sounds flat and dry otherwise. I don't mind moral ambiguity in a novel -- it can make it much more interesting and real -- but with neither plot nor hero this just seemed as drab as an East Berlin apartment.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kevinashley
Stunning - an apparently humdrum tale of two old friends who end up almost drifting into the world of espionage with an explosive denoument.
LibraryThing member Replay
So long my friend !!! Boring to the brim
LibraryThing member edella
Absolute Friends is a superbly paced novel spanning fifty-six years, a theatrical masterstroke of tragicomic writing, and a savage fable of our times, almost of our hours. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in a shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha,
Show More
refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late Sixties, again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies. Deriving its scale from A Perfect Spy and its passion from The Constant Gardener, Le Carre's new novel presents us with magical writing, characters to delight, and a spellbinding story that enchants even as it challenges.
Show Less
LibraryThing member chellerystick
I listened to the audio abridgment during a 1900 mile drive, and although it entertained me, I didn't think the quality was up to the level of the other books of his I've read. The main characters are interesting enough, but many of the other characters feel a little too cartoonish. Also, some of
Show More
the psychology is missing, perhaps due to the abridgment but, judging from others' reviews, perhaps not: where are their motivations? where is the suspense? Instead, it all comes off as a bit too matter of fact. I did, however, love hearing le Carré read his own work, getting into the speaking styles he imagined for each character.
Show Less
LibraryThing member TLievens
First novel I have read by Le Carré and what strikes foremost is his beautiful use of the English language. I only wonder whether Sasha and Mundy really are true friends - to me they have more of a love/hate relationship. Then again, maybe that is the definition of friendship
LibraryThing member vixen666
Spy story set in Berlin, spanning Cold War to the modern "war on terror". True le Carre.
LibraryThing member johnbakeronline
As usual it's a gem, written with a raging prose about the world we live in.
LibraryThing member indygo88
I gave this a go...but ended up giving up. I'm not sure what it was -- I think a combination of the abridgement & my inability to keep my attention on it. Given another chance, with my mind in its right place, I think I'd probably enjoy it more.
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
Just great! Le Carre is such a great storyteller, such a great creator of characters. Mundy is fantastic, Sasha is better. Also, Le Carre narrates this himself, and does a wonderful job. He does voices, but doesn't over-do them.
LibraryThing member patrickgarson
Le Carre books are almost a genre unto themselves these days, and like any genre, they can be a bit hit and miss. Absolute Friends is reasonably good, but it does suffer a little from flab and slight indulgence.

Teddy has come a long way from his activist student days in Berlin, however his friend
Show More
Sasha is a presence that haunts him through the decades, and he guides Teddy into the ethical morass of intelligence work.

I think Le Carre is often under-rated as a stylist, in part because he's so readable and prolific, but for me the most enjoyable component of Absolute Friends was the prose. Sharp and observant, his writing is also veined with lyricism, and the elegiac, weary tone is just perfect for the story.

In terms of narrative, this is not the cracking pace that some of his other novels are - though the final quarter races by. Covering so many decades via a flashback felt a little meandering at times, and though I was enjoying the characters and their situations, the through-line was hard to trace. I wasn't sure *why* I was reading so much history.

Ultimately that history is a form of characterisation, not just of Teddy and Sasha but the developing - or rather devolving - intelligence community. Absolute Friends marked the first "hard left" turn that Le Carre took and in that context I can see why it was so bracing at the time. Five books later, and the tune is a little familiar, as are the characters, the arc they describe and the conclusion - which was a little too pat and just-so for me.

Though I agree with Le Carre on a political level, I do find his latter novels can lack the subtlety of some of his earlier work, the point is really rammed home and it's a bit of a shame as his characters are so life-like and prose so modulated.

For all that, it's still an enjoyable book. Not the best place to start on Le Carre, but by this stage, I can't imagine there are too many readers who haven't read at least one of this books.
Show Less
LibraryThing member JFBallenger
The story unfolds somewhat slowly, built around a vivid depiction of the intense and unlikely friendship that develops between Pakistani-born Brit Ted Mundy and German left-wing radical Sasha, who meet in the turbulent environment of student dissent in 1960s West Berlin. The trust that develops
Show More
between them is hard won and hard tested through their involvement in radical left politics of the 1960s, then cold war intrigue as both come to serve for decades as highly effective double agents working for the downfall of the soviet Eastern bloc and especially the hated Stasi of East Germany, and finally as pawns in a deadly scheme in the 21st century war on terror.

The dramatization of Mundy and Sasha’s relationship is brilliant. Though personal trust is the linchpin of their relationship, this is not simpleminded story that politics is superficial, unworthy of our attention – the province of mere fanatics who ware not to be trusted on any account. Indeed, it is their commitment in different ways to a politics of freedom and human decency that draws them together, and is bound up in their relationship as it evolves.
.
**Spoiler alert**

My one misgiving in the novel concerns the paranoid conclusion, in which it turns out that Sasha’s political passions, and Mundy’s commitment to Sasha as hope perhaps for a decent world, are manipulated by agents provocateurs committed to the hegemony of the US corporate state, and gunned down in a sham raid staged to silence European critics and dissenters in of the war on terrorism.

Is such a thing plausible? One would like to think that it is not. But since the novel’s publication some aspects of this kind of plot have been borne out by events – e.g. “terrorists” recruited by US intelligence operatives only to have their plans, which were really only ever the machinations of the US agents who manipulated them, foiled in highly public operations calculated to prove the need and efficacy of US intelligence operations, and the targeted assassination of US citizens deemed by US administration officials to be enemy combatants. Given those developments, and recent revelations of spying, one really does not have terribly firm grounds for dismissing the plot climax as paranoid delusion.

But in the end, the plausibility of the novel’s concluding plot device is far less important than the plausibility of the two main characters commitment to a politics of resistance to injustice and oppression in the face of profound uncertainties, and their related commitment to each other as friends. This is the thread of integrity which le Carre offers in a world in which truth of any kind is virtually impossible to find.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Frank_Mukasa
Marvelous and horryfying
LibraryThing member jonfaith
It was late winter in 2004 and we were in London. A friend of the family gushed over Absolute Friends, stating it was the only book that he and his father had agreed upon. Flipping ahead eight years, I can understand why the book was so received but that doesn't mean I liked it. Linking the Cold
Show More
War, protest movements and the evangelical tone of the War on Terror, the novel is sympathetic but sort of blurred: a gestalt where Rupert Murdoch and George Soros are really the same person, or at least the same Interests.
Show Less

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2003

Physical description

455 p.; 9.5 inches

ISBN

0316000647 / 9780316000642
Page: 0.7443 seconds