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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)
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Ted Mundy, Pakistan-born English major's son, Germanophile and student rebel, has just about settled into mediocrity at the
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.
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
This is the life story of Ted Mundy, failed student, employee, and
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.
Teddy has come a long way from his activist student days in Berlin, however his friend
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.
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.
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**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.