An absolutely triumphant bestseller-everywhere hailed as the masterpiece toward which John le Carre has been building since the fall of communism. ...
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Jan 16, 2012
Gwen
rated it: 
I decided to read other reviewers here on Goodreads before I gave my stars. Turns out they didn't change my first instinct to give it a solid four. Was hard for me to buy the (spoiler alert) probability that Mundy would take up with Sasha a THIRD time in response to his appeal to save the world having had two prior undesirable outcomes. But I could get past it in view of so many salient themes to the modern setting. I found it interesting that it was copywritten 2003, which explains all the
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Jan 04, 2010
Rebekah
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Michael buys me a book. I will remember this from now onwards. We have different tastes. I read mostly for fun and escape; he reads to stir him to think. I know I am a bit of an ostrich, but I like it. Absolute Friends is not a novel of escape but one of trapping fear. John le Carré has created a web of spies and lies all to one end point out that we are a fearful people who will given the chance run and hid behind our government’s guns no matter at whom they are pointing.
This novel spend More...
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May 23, 2009
Christine
rated it:
The old spy game is taken up a notch in Le Carre’s “Absolute Friends.” Here the intrigue and spying are not merely about competing Cold War ideologies, but the friendship of two men who came of age and connected as friends amidst the radical student movement of the 1960s in West Germany. The friendship continues throughout the novel, as the friends meet and drift apart again over the years, but never lose the ultimate bond (estranged boyhoods and youthful idealism) that united them in the first
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May 22, 2011
Yvann
rated it:
"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 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 a More...
Ted Mundy, Pakistan-born English major's son, Germanophile and student rebel, has just about settled into mediocrity at the 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 a More...
Dec 03, 2011
KarenC
rated it: 
Some good character development in this novel, but a disappointing story. There was lots of potential in this novel that spanned the Cold War to the War on Terror. I was disappointed in Ted, who seemed to just drift along into the spy game after several years of student protest and rebellion. He & Sasha were "absolute friends" to end who had maybe been by-passed by changes in the trade. I cheered for their commitment to protest and their young ideals, but missed some of the detail that
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Dec 05, 2010
Jim
rated it: 
Read it and weep, Robert Harris. This is how to write a spy thriller. Le Carre's strength, or one of them (and there are many) is his characterisations which, in less skilled hands, could be the ludicrous caricatures I mentioned above. He makes them believable though. As he does the situations. You really begin to believe that the world of espionage works exactly as portrayed here. His heroes tend to be offbeat misfits who can't seem to settle in a normal life and, from the novels I've read so f
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Feb 16, 2011
I'm of two minds on this. Mostly, I really loved it. It is powerfully written and the main characters are interesting. They are very real and flawed and so much more interesting because I want them to have something good happen to them, despite all their flaws. That is where I am mixed. I expected something like the ending but it still left me feeling like I was listening to the news; depressed and helpless. Oh, and bitter. LeCarre is always good at the moral universe inhabited by spies but here
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Jan 22, 2009
Mark
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Calling John le Carre a spy novelist is liking calling Shakespeare a jingle writer. Nevertheless, there was something about this book that bothered me enough to knock one star off my otherwise high regard, and I think I can discuss it without issuing a spoiler alert.
First, the basics: Ted Mundy is a Brit who almost falls into the spy trade after he renews his acquaintance with old student friend, the enigmatic and charismatic Sasha. Together, they had played street revolutionar More...
Oct 08, 2010
Robert
rated it:
As always, I found Le Carre' quite entertaining. I often wondered what Le Carre' turned to after his Cold War thrillers. This book was great it had a surprise ending. The thesis of this thriller is that the War on Terror can be an excuse for the conservative political powers to seek out and destroy "innocent" liberals. Even though those liberals might be intellectual revolutionaries. The title comes from a friendship between two such liberal "revolutionaries". Le Carre'
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May 03, 2009
Brendan
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Absolute Friends is one of the most poisonously Anti-American spy novels ever written. That said, I have to say LeCarre is pretty spot on about the way the Americans were running their Intel during the Bush years.
Absolute Friends tells the story of two friends, a brit and a German who were radicals together in Berlin during the 1960s and how they subsequently got turned into spies and after serving the West heroically, they ultimately get used by a CIA type operation to invent a terr More...
Absolute Friends tells the story of two friends, a brit and a German who were radicals together in Berlin during the 1960s and how they subsequently got turned into spies and after serving the West heroically, they ultimately get used by a CIA type operation to invent a terr More...
May 23, 2011
Nick
rated it:
Typical of Le Carre's intelligent, complex and literary spy thrillers, this novel paints a chilling picture of seemingly ordinary people caught up in an upside-down world of counter spies and counter-counter spies. The two "friends" of the title are in many ways opposites: the dwarfish, obsessive Sasha and the studious, unfocused Mundy. Their strong bond through the years is never justified convincingly. Mundy is a frustrating protagonist--he lets himself get easily carried away by any
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Sep 06, 2010
Jered
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After one false start I picked this novel up again and was almost immediately hooked. This is high-level entertainment beefed up with some nutritious and timely philosophical questions about national and international loyalties, responsibility to God, King, and Country, and the sometimes-fine-line between duty and righteousness. Do the means justify the ends? Does anyone even know what the "ends" are anymore? Not as crisp, terse, and razor-sharp as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
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Jan 24, 2012
Athena
rated it:
This book mostly seemed like a forum for John le Carre to vent about post-9/11 US/British politics, lament what the world has come to, and deliver an elegy for the integrity of national security and intelligence operations during the Cold War. The two protagonists -- aging men who meet as radical activists in West Berlin in the '60s and seem to spend their whole lives trying to keep those glory days alive in one way or another -- were predictable, which seems to defeat the purpose of a good spy
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Feb 19, 2011
Stefan
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Absolute Friends was the story of a complicated friendship spanning much of the twentieth century. The psychological depth of this friendship was reason enough to read this novel. The issues discussed, events mentioned and locations described gave me much food for thought. The intelligent, well-paced and insightful story was gripping and authentic in the way few thrillers are today . But I was most touched by the power of the story’s cynical conclusion: it forced me to soberly consider the treme
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Jun 05, 2009
Nicholasjordansherwood
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jul 01, 2010
Thomas
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This is about five-sixths of one of the best novels I have ever read. It is unusually told -- in present tense -- with a dreamlike quality to it that had me utterly captivated. LeCarre is a brilliant stylist at the worst of times; here he is fantastically on his game, and the prose is crystalline. I felt the characters and experiences so vividly I was glued to the page. Then most of the way through, it kind of takes a random turn and you start to see what the whole thing is about...and, frankly,
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Oct 20, 2008
Roger
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There's a funny thing about John Le Carre (aka David Cornwall). While his Smiley series of coldwar novels were good he really came into his own when the cold war ended and he resolved the issues around his own father in A PERFECT SPY. Basically, despite his cynicism and de-glamorising of the world of espionage, Le Carre believed in what the West was doing during the cold war and believed that Gorbachev and a New World Order would find a reformed USSR and West working together to make the world
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Sep 19, 2008
Philip
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Aug 06, 2008
Maureen
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Ted Mundy grew up in Pakistan until he was shipped off to boarding school in England, ending up as a student radical in West Berlin. While in university, he met Sasha, a student anarchist. They became close friends. Years pass, during which Ted has been thrown out of West Berlin for his political activities, and has subsequently failed as a variety of jobs, including schoolmaster, journalist, and novelist. At this point, Sasha re-enters Ted's life. Having defected to East Berlin and become
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Jul 05, 2008
Jeff
rated it:
I’m going to do the same review for “The Mission Song” and “Absolute Friends” because these books have so much in common. They both show a great writer having stumbled on his own frustration at international politics. Both books are suffused with anger that does not characterize Le Carre’s other works, and this anger impedes the storytelling and changes thematic representation to Neanderthalic proselytizing. In the past Le Carre has dealt with subjects before that he finds offensive (“The Nig
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Sep 02, 2007
Jen
rated it:
This man always and forever is one of my favorite authors. His writing style is both spare and intricate at the same time; his sense of humor dry and razor sharp. And his books always have made me question things like perception and "common knowledge".
Absolute Friends wasn't very subtle with its message, as many of his other books have been. In many ways it's the most political of any of his books that I've read so far. I sensed in it a man who is very angry with the way th More...
Absolute Friends wasn't very subtle with its message, as many of his other books have been. In many ways it's the most political of any of his books that I've read so far. I sensed in it a man who is very angry with the way th More...
Mar 21, 2010
Susan
rated it:
Sasha and Ted are friends and activists during the turbulent era of the Vietnam War. After a period of separation during which Ted marries and becomes a cultural attache of sorts, Sasha finds and recruits him to be a double agent on behalf of the British against the East German Stasi, a secret life which wrecks Ted's marriage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ted runs a school in Heidelberg but his partner in the venture mismanages the funds and Ted ends up as a tour guide in Leipzig. There
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Dec 30, 2010
Piet
rated it:
Another le Carre classic, in my view. Flashbacks into the history of two friends provide tension and illuminate again a time that is already almost forgotten, although it is so recent. The present tense in the plot provides a most intriguing puzzle, of which the solution horrifies us as it suddenly unfolds with the inevitability of a slow-motion wreck, where everything makes sense, while at the same time everything is absolutely wrong.
Mar 16, 2010
Claire
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Oct 24, 2011
Chloe
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Just like its main character Ted Mundy, Absolute Friends is a novel with many faces.
You get to follow the British hero through his unexpectedly adventurous life: whether it is as an young anarchist in Berlin, a touristic guide in the south of Germany, or a spy through Europe.
As the title suggests, it's also a great story of friendship, between Mundy and the enigmatic Sasha, a rebel with a cause who's sometimes hard to follow. These two men will be caught in the nightmare of post-9/11 E More...
You get to follow the British hero through his unexpectedly adventurous life: whether it is as an young anarchist in Berlin, a touristic guide in the south of Germany, or a spy through Europe.
As the title suggests, it's also a great story of friendship, between Mundy and the enigmatic Sasha, a rebel with a cause who's sometimes hard to follow. These two men will be caught in the nightmare of post-9/11 E More...
May 02, 2010
J.
rated it:
This book is just o.k. I did not like it quite as much as some of his previous books. I don't understand the point of the novel - so what? If Ted Mundy was any good he would have gotten out successfully but he is not projected as being that asture, only enough to find out problems when it was way too late.
J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"
J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"
Aug 16, 2011
Lex
rated it:
Schöner, deprimierender und etwas kaltblütiger Spionageroman, der das Desinformationspogrom im Vorfeld Irakkrieges als Ausgangspunkt für eine Geschichte der Lüge und Spionage im kalten Krieg und der daraus folgenden, fatalen Freundschaft zweier ehemaliger Regimegegner und Doppelläufer. Liest sich nicht schnell, weil detail- und kenntnisreich, ist aber sauspannend.
May 20, 2009
Randy
rated it:
a modern (read post-9/11) story castigating dominant states and their ongoing apparti of deceit and obfuscation where the amoral guys cast themselves as the good protectors and treat individuals as disposable units...le carre's detailed back stories of the protagonist and his lifelong frind is some of the deftest prose i've ever read ... i'm still processing the ending which frankly i didn't see coming...
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Jan 27, 2009
Beverly
rated it:
Classic LeCarre on the early life and development of a spy (a la The perfect Spy), but insane conspiracy theory about the U.S. government and multi-natinal corporations getting together to stage a terrorist capture in Western Europe (Germany). Why? To influence world opinion against terrorism? To extend the U.S. corporate imperialist reach? Rabidly paranoid view.
Mar 14, 2011
Stephen King says: "The powerfully affecting tale of cashiered spy Ted Mundy and his lifelong friendship with Sasha, his enigmatic opposite number. What turns on the novel's powerful afterburner is le Carré's Absolute Fury at the Bush-Blair reaction to the bin Laden attacks on New York. This is the sort of book you either love or hate...which means it's doing its job."
