Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Independence Public Library | CD FICTION - LE CARRE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | CD FIC LE CARRE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
With a career spanning five decades, John le Carré has established himself as one of the greatest living English writers. Now, in this new, exquisitely told novel, he shows us once again his acute understanding of the world we live in and where power really lies. In the wake of the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a tennis vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world¿s number one money launderer, who wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an all-night interrogation by the British Secret Service, which also needs their help. Their acquiescence will lead them on a precarious journey through Paris to a safe house in Switzerland, helpless pawns in a game of nations that reveals the unholy alliances between the Russian mafia, the City of London, the government and the competing factions of the British Secret Service.
Author Notes
David John Moore Cornwell was born in Poole, Dorsetshire, England in 1931. He attended Bern University in Switzerland from 1948-49 and later completed a B.A. at Lincoln College, Oxford. He taught at Eton from 1956-58 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964.
He writes espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré. The pseudonym was necessary when he began writing, in the early 1960s because, at that time, he held a diplomatic position with the British Foreign Office and was not allowed to publish under his own name. When his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller in 1964, he left the foreign service to write full time. His other works include Call for the Dead; A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People.
He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986 and the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in 1988. In 2011 he accepted the Goethe Medal. And in 2020, he accepted the Olof Palme Prize. Ten of his books have been adapted for television and motion pictures including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor.
Le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life, became a New York Times bestseller in 2016. In 2019, he published a spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field.
John Le Carré died on December 12, 2020 from pneumonia at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Those readers who have found post-cold war le Carre too cerebral will have much to cheer about with this Russian mafia spy thriller. While on holiday in Antigua, former Oxford tutor Perry Makepiece and his lawyer girlfriend, Gail Perkins, meet Dmitri "Dima" Vladimirovich Krasnov, an avuncular Russian businessman who challenges Perry to a tennis match. Even though Perry wins, Dima takes a shine to the couple, and soon they're visiting with his extended family. At Dima's request, Perry conveys a message to MI6 in England that Dima wishes to defect, and on arriving home, Perry and Gail receive a summons from MI6 to a debriefing. Not only is Dima a Russian oligarch, he's also one of the world's biggest money launderers. Le Carre ratchets up the tension step-by-step until the sad, inevitable end. His most accessible work in years, this novel shows once again why his name is the one to which all others in the field are compared. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Le Carr uses still another aspect of international relations in the new world orderthe powerful, equivocal position of money launderers to the Russian mobto put a new spin on a favorite theme: the betrayal that inevitably follows from sharply divided loyalties.In between his hated old life as an Oxford don and his dimly imagined new life as a grade-school teacher, Peregrine Makepiece takes his girlfriend, rising barrister Gail Perkins, on holiday to Antigua. Their prowess on the tennis court is observed by an amiable Russian who presses Perry to play him. But Dima, n Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, wants much more than a game. In return for providing details to Her Majesty's Secret Service about his money laundering for the Seven Brothers, who dominate Russian organized crime, he wants asylum and protection for himself and his family. He wants his children to be placed in top English schools. And he wants Perry to hold his hand through it all. Following their exhaustive debriefing by Luke and Yvonne, a pair of jaundiced spooks, Perry and Gail are sent to Paris, where Dima has asked for a meeting that's clearly supposed to set the stage for his flight from his comrades. Don't try to behave like spies, Perry and Gail are advisedact innocent. That's easily done, because the couple is much more innocent than they realize. Although they know more than they ought to about Dima's family, especially his daughter Natasha, they know next to nothing about his business associates, and nothing at all of Luke's fragile position in the Service, or his boss Hector Meredith's complicated set of conflicts with financiers, lawyers, lobbyists and Members of Parliament whose agendas are quite different from Hector's, Luke's, Perry's or Dima's.While other novelists are doing everything they can to inflate their tales of cloak and dagger, trust Le Carr (A Most Wanted Man, 2008, etc.) to make his story of international money laundering, political infighting and unwitting treachery into a chamber symphony of exquisite delicacy.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In his last few novels, le Carré has exhibited a remarkable ability to turn multiple forms of international chicanery into gripping, incisive fiction, seemingly before the end of the news cycle. In The Constant Gardener (2001), it was drug testing in Africa by the pharmaceutical industry; in A Most Wanted Man (2008), it was the way the anti-terror industry runs havoc over individual lives. Now, it's something a little different: international money-laundering. It starts when two idealistic young professionals, one an Oxford professor, the other a lawyer, take a tennis vacation in Antigua, where they meet an unsavory Russian who claims to be the world's Number One money-launderer. Dima wants Perry and Gail to help him defect to the West not from Russia, in the cold war sense, but from the Russian underworld, whose leaders have decided he knows too much. One of the things Dima knows is which British vulture capitalists have used Russian Mob money to survive the collapse of the banking industry. It is a complex but fascinating subject, and le Carré dissects it brilliantly. As usual, though, the real focus isn't on sorting out good guys from bad; it's on the somber realization that there are no good guys, that the British Secret Service is no more trustworthy than the Russian Mafia. Perry and Gail, the latest in a long line of le Carré naïfs to learn that institutions prey on individuals, grow up painfully but with considerable grace. In the world as le Carré finds it, grace under pressure is about as good as it gets.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERYONE knows that pop culture is bonkers for brooding, romantic, dangerous types with underworld connections. I am speaking, of course, of vampires. But a long time ago, before Bella and Edward even started dating, there was another dark romantic hero who captured our imaginations. He was called a spy. He drank gin or whiskey, not blood. He was preferably English. Educated. And if he had to kill someone he did it like a gentleman, which is to say with a poisoned dart at the end of an umbrella. John le Carré is to spy fiction what Lindsay Lohan is to TMZ. It's hard to imagine one without the other. He is the papa of cold war spy novels. (His literary agent must have wept when the Berlin Wall went down.) In his new book, "Our Kind of Traitor," le Carré may not bring back the old-school secret agent, but he'll certainly warm the hearts of those of us who long for the era before Jack Bauer, when spies quoted P.G. Wodehouse and wore mackintoshes. Sure, "Our Kind of Traitor" takes place more or less in the present. Characters send text messages, and find that they cannot visit the gardens of the Champs-Élysées because "Michelle Obama and her children are in town." The evil-doers are bankers, gangsters and money launderers, not the K.G.B. But there is a filter of nostalgia that gives the narrative a jaunty midcentury feel. Characters go on tennis holiday. Spies sing from "La Traviata" while cooking. Everyone speaks French. And Britain is a major player in a global conspiracy. It all starts with the above-mentioned tennis holiday. Gail and Perry, a "strikingly attractive" and upwardly mobile English couple, find themselves caught up in espionage intrigue while practicing their backhands in Antigua. Gail is a "sparky young barrister on the rise." Perry is a former tutor in English literature at Oxford and an accomplished athlete. They have been together for five years and have yet to get married. ("Marry that girl," almost every male character in the book tells Perry at some point.) The couple are on Day 1 of their vacation. There's some swimming. They make "languorous love in the afternoon," then hit the tennis courts. Perry plays qualifiers for Queen's and made it to the Masters; he is, in short, a bit of a tennis stud. It does not go unnoticed, and he is soon challenged to a match by a "muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle 50s called Dima." Perry agrees, and things quickly get hinky. I mean, hello - Dima is wearing a crimson blouse with gray tracksuit pants, a diamond-encrusted gold Rolex and leather espadrilles. He's clearly a very wealthy Russian crook. Or Mickey Rourke. The match is set for the next morning. Perry and Gail show up at 6:45. (The kind of people who go on tennis holiday are also the kind of people who will get up before 7 a.m. on vacation.) Perry wins. Naturally. He is a tennis stud, remember? But Dima is so impressed by Perry's sense of fair play that he forgives him. In fact, "he's not merely gracious, he's moved to tears of admiration and gratitude." Oh, yeah. One tiny thing. Dima has a favor he's hoping that Perry can help him out with: he wants to flee to England, spill some secrets about the Russian underworld and enroll his children at Eton. Soon Perry and Gail are elbow to elbow with the British secret service trying to get Dima and his large sullen family to Mother England, a process that involves some enviable European travel. Their contacts in the service are Hector, Luke and Ollie - their code names, I swear, are Tom, Dick and Harry. They are classic spy archetypes, morally complex but loyal to their calling. It's all a little familiar. But le Carré's execution is perfect. There are no narrative missteps. His gift at character shorthand is as strong as ever, whether he is describing "flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it," or Gail's first impression of Luke, whom she considers too small. "Male spies, she told herself with a false jocularity brought on by nervousness, should come a size larger." It is always a pleasure to be in the hands of an entirely competent writer. Le Carré pays his usual attention to plot. This one involves Russian gangsters and international banking - all very of-the-moment. I suppose le Carré is trying to be relevant. (The publicity materials even include a 2009 article from The Observer of London that echoes the narrative conspiracy.) Yet the appeal of the book is not in its modernity, but in its stubborn embrace of the past. Spies wear berets and fedoras. A vacationing teenager wears "a Hakka-style lampshade hat and a cheongsam dress with toggle buttons and Grecian sandals cross-tied round her ankles." This is le Carré's universe, not ours. All the better. Le Carré made a name for himself by injecting a sense of moral ambiguity into spy fiction. But these days, post Watergate, post weapons of mass destruction, post Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne, institutional corruption and moral ambiguity are a given. Governments do bad stuff? Well, yeahhhh. No duh. It's sort of thrilling to inhabit a world, even briefly, where characters are surprised when people and institutions fail to live up to their expectations. Chelsea Cain is the author of "Heartsick." Her new thriller, "The Night Season," will be published in March.
Library Journal Review
Former British Foreign Service agent le Carre's (www.johnlecarre.com) 22nd title will delight fans of his Cold War espionage novels. Once again, we have the long, patient discussions used to befriend would-be informants to the British Secret Service, only this time the informants bring to light a new kind of security problem: Russian money laundering on a massive scale. Actor Robin Sachs performs all of the parts admirably. Expect revived interest in le Carre's backlist owing to the anticipated late 2011 motion picture adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, previously adapted into a BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness. [The New York Times best-selling Viking hc was recommended as "a sure bet for all public libraries," LJ 9/1/10; the Penguin pb will publish in April 2011.-Ed.]-Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ. Lib., Russellville (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.