Review: Absolute Friends by John le Carre
Absolute Friends
by John le Carre
Okay, I've finally finished this book. Some of you may remember my mentioning how tedious and slowly it was going for me some time back. So I'm doing a full review. Except it’s not going to be very long.
In a nutshell, le Carre’s style is what it diffcult for me to read this book. It took me more than a year of plodding through the book, going off and on it, like a bad cough that wouldn’t go away. Of course, in between this I finished many other books. This is my first le Carre, although I have heard of him since the early eighties. Those days, I read somewhere that someone described him as "Ian Fleming’s James Bond without the glamour". It would seem apt a description, Le Carre’s Ted Mundy here is an ordinary English bloke, although with a colourful history.
The story is one of the aforementioned Mundy, first of his current life as an English-speaking tour guide in a Linderhof castle, and slowly flashes back to his childhood in Pakistan. Then the story slowly recounts his life from there right up until it meets the current again, almost to the end of the book. The story centers around Mundy, himself of dubious political beliefs (probably it isn’t dubious, I just couldn’t be bothered to fully understand his roundabout rhetorics) and his long friendship with a German radical called Sasha.
Both turn into double agents for their respective states and for each other, sometimes involving a couple of both legitimate and shadowy organizations, both often seldom mentioned in full detail. What le Carre has down is update his brand of espionage thrillers into the 21st century in the backdrop of post 9-11 terrorism and borderless nations. A lot of the book deals in arguments of ideologies and ideals that seemed old in the seventies, let alone the new millennium.
In the end, the ending is a little unnecessary, but not entirely unexpected.
le Carre is good at what he does, and he probably loves doing it. He crafts narratives and dialogue with a sharp wit and a deft touch, something few others can do. But the problem is that, he gets self indulgent, to a certain extent. His descriptions and dialogues can go on for a page or two, and more often than not I found myself skipping ahead, and finding they don’t really say much after a couple of pages. This book will no doubt delight his fans, but for the new readers who are accustomed to the fast paced and intriguing thrillers that are all too common these days, they may find this book a little too slow just like I did.
by John le Carre
Okay, I've finally finished this book. Some of you may remember my mentioning how tedious and slowly it was going for me some time back. So I'm doing a full review. Except it’s not going to be very long.
In a nutshell, le Carre’s style is what it diffcult for me to read this book. It took me more than a year of plodding through the book, going off and on it, like a bad cough that wouldn’t go away. Of course, in between this I finished many other books. This is my first le Carre, although I have heard of him since the early eighties. Those days, I read somewhere that someone described him as "Ian Fleming’s James Bond without the glamour". It would seem apt a description, Le Carre’s Ted Mundy here is an ordinary English bloke, although with a colourful history.
The story is one of the aforementioned Mundy, first of his current life as an English-speaking tour guide in a Linderhof castle, and slowly flashes back to his childhood in Pakistan. Then the story slowly recounts his life from there right up until it meets the current again, almost to the end of the book. The story centers around Mundy, himself of dubious political beliefs (probably it isn’t dubious, I just couldn’t be bothered to fully understand his roundabout rhetorics) and his long friendship with a German radical called Sasha.
Both turn into double agents for their respective states and for each other, sometimes involving a couple of both legitimate and shadowy organizations, both often seldom mentioned in full detail. What le Carre has down is update his brand of espionage thrillers into the 21st century in the backdrop of post 9-11 terrorism and borderless nations. A lot of the book deals in arguments of ideologies and ideals that seemed old in the seventies, let alone the new millennium.
In the end, the ending is a little unnecessary, but not entirely unexpected.
le Carre is good at what he does, and he probably loves doing it. He crafts narratives and dialogue with a sharp wit and a deft touch, something few others can do. But the problem is that, he gets self indulgent, to a certain extent. His descriptions and dialogues can go on for a page or two, and more often than not I found myself skipping ahead, and finding they don’t really say much after a couple of pages. This book will no doubt delight his fans, but for the new readers who are accustomed to the fast paced and intriguing thrillers that are all too common these days, they may find this book a little too slow just like I did.
posted by Yoong Family at 10:07 pm
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