Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:          


JOHN LE CARRÉ – Absolute Friends. Hodder, UK, hardcover, 2003. Little Brown, US, hardcover, 2004. Back Bay Books, US, softcover, 2004.

   Those of you who follow the comments section here know I have a love/hate relationship with John Le Carré’s work. I find it amusing that a relatively low level diplomatic operative who ran a Post Office drop in Germany in the Cold War, and who makes up ninety percent of his tradecraft and jargon, is considered to be an authority on intelligence work, and whose knee jerk anti-Americanism is a tired rehash of sixties leftish British politics the rest of the world long outgrew, is praised by so many critics who fail to note that his dialogue is often painfully stilted, his prose heavy, and his turn of phrase almost never gracious or smooth.

   I sometimes liken him to Mark Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper, in that I’m not sure the critics actually praising his work read it or much care for thriller fiction. They seem to feel the more difficult he is to read the more gifted he must be. As a stylist he is closer to Cooper or Dennis Wheatley than Graham Greene or Ian Fleming, but lacking their flair for melodrama.

   Despite all that, at his best Le Carré can be a compelling and intelligent writer. Call For the Dead, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Looking Glass War, A Small Town in Germany, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Night Manager, Our Game, and The Constant Gardner are all books that I enjoyed and admired.

   For every bad book like A Most Wanted Man, where he shows his considerable limitations politically as a pundit and as a writer with a thoroughly disproven thesis and poor handling of a non-Brit protagonist, he wrote something like The Perfect Spy (his best novel if not spy novel) or this book, Absolute Friends.

   It probably helps that Absolute Friends is a young man’s book despite Le Carré’s age; angry and passionate in its politics and point of view. It follows three unlucky people from the sixties to the run up to the post 9/11 invasion of Iraq; Ted Mundy, a radical Brit academic, Sasha, a leftish friend of his youth, and Zara, a young Turkish single mother who is now Mundy’s partner and lover.

   The book deals with how two young leftist activists in sixties Germany become caught up in intelligence working for the British, and how they are brutally used by American and British intelligence as well as the Bush and Blair governments eventually as part of the conspiracy to justify the Iraq war. That the big payoff comes across as rather silly as terrorist plots go is a weakness, but he handles the characters so well here it matters less than it might. Frankly, most writers on the other end of the political spectrum don’t handle this part much better, and they are trying create serious threats.

   Le Carré has always wanted to be Graham Greene, but has always lacked Greene’s strengths, his wit and humor, his Catholic guilt, or his compassion for all of his creations, even the Americans like Pyle in The Quiet American. The fact that in five decades of writing thrillers Le Carré has never created a single believable American character shows his limitations. He has come close to Greene a few times not including his rewrite of Greene’s Our Man In Havana, The Tailor of Panama, a book I found largely embarrassing, and here he is probably as close to Greeneland as he will ever get. That is a compliment for anyone who cares.

   Like or hate the politics or his great theme here, dismiss his knee jerk anti-American tendencies or loathe them, face that he really never has written women very well (all the women in his books are basically men with breasts when he bothers to write about them at all, either all brilliant and beautiful or troll-like and smart), even dislike his at time difficult prose, this is a young man’s passionate book and better for it.

   Absolute Friends is both a good post Cold War spy novel and a good novel. It is Le Carré at his best, and for once deserving of the praise it receives from critics. If nothing else, the sections in Germany in the sixties are as good as anything he has written since A Small Town in Germany, and that was very good indeed. For once the most over-praised writer in thrillerdom deserves the accolades his work received.