A Most Wanted Man

Dec 17, 2012 Jason added it

Shelves: read-2008

Never having read anything by le Carré before, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew of his legacy, and I had seen The Constant Gardener (a film I quite enjoyed, though that was partly because of the gorgeous cinematography), but that was about it. So it was on the recommendation of an interesting review in the NY Times a month or so ago that I picked this book up.

I'm glad I did. A Most Wanted Man is a very striking novel about people trying to live their lives in a world that was changed after t...more Never having read anything by le Carré before, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew of his legacy, and I had seen The Constant Gardener (a film I quite enjoyed, though that was partly because of the gorgeous cinematography), but that was about it. So it was on the recommendation of an interesting review in the NY Times a month or so ago that I picked this book up.

I'm glad I did. A Most Wanted Man is a very striking novel about people trying to live their lives in a world that was changed after the events of 9/11. For most people, this change hasn't been a personal one, but rather something ideological. Luckily, most of us only have secondary or tertiary connections to the horrific accidents, at best, and so the change that has occured has been in the actions of governments and the feelings of fear, anger, etc. that we feel.

So it is for the characters of this novel. We are introduced to Issa, who may or may not be connected to terrorism, and his lawyer, a German woman who desperately wants to save this poor man. We are also introduced to the intelligence community, mostly through Bachmann, a German intelligence agent, but there will be plenty more of his ilk by the time the novel is even halfway through.

What surprised me is how little action there is in this book. It isn't the Bourne Identity or even a Jack Ryan type novel. This is about conversations and surveillance. It succeeds. It digs into how agents are fighting amongst themselves, trying to save the world in the only way they know. Only everyone has a different idea and how this mishmash comes together to form policy is both realistic and frightening. More interesting are the people who get caught up in the game of intelligence through no real desire of theirs and how they are manipulated and how they try to manipulate. Does this book directly relate to most common people? No, but parallels can easily be drawn, though our lives are much more benign, much less fraught with peril and Islamic extremists.

I'll admit the vehemence in the ending is a bit...exagerated, though the action and the decisions make absolute sense to me. I cannot give it away, but it seems that it was the only way, really, for this book to finish. I raced through the end, desperate to know and I was satisfied in my racing. It's sad and it's sorrowful, but it's well done and it's beautiful as well. I shall be adding a few of le Carré's novels to my stack of books to read after this, because A Most Wanted Man is a truly good book worthy of consideration.(less)

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Oct 23, 2008 Chuckell rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I feel like John le Carre is thought of as the grand old man of spy fiction. But his books really aren't what I tend to think of when I think of spy novels--they're always about world-weary bureaucrats doing grubby things that they know better than to be doing, about sad beat-up men whose best efforts generally just bring them, and everyone around them, more sadness. No high-tech gadgets or thrilling derring-do here--just an unhappy story with an unhappy ending. But gorgeously written.

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Nov 27, 2008 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The wanted man at the center of LeCarre's latest becomes a deeper mystery, even as more is revealed at every turn of the plot. Set in Germany, the book pulls in Russia, Chechnya and Turkey in its opening chapters. The storyline moves from international banking to Islamist intrigue. As the multi-national cast of characters struggle to make sense of the political twists and turns, none gets a full story of what is happening, and the key characters' motivations are a complex blend of each one's ind...more

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Jun 26, 2008 Eno Sarris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I like LeCarre (Spy Who Came in from the Cold is great), and this one is centered in one of my hometowns, Hamburg. What's great about this book is LeCarre's unique analysis of post-9/11 spying, and all the red tape and International finagling that is going on. What's also good about this book, though, is that the characters are interesting and believable, and not just there to advance the plot.

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Dec 15, 2008 Erik Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Superb, if your'e into espionage, and if you are, you probably already know that no one does it better than Le Carre, except maybe Graham Greene when he aimed his pen in that direction. This book is a great yarn about the spooks in the newest incarnation of espionage, the "war on terror." The quotation marks were intended.

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Jan 28, 2011 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars

Chilling and excellent. More of a thriller than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but still focused on what's happening in the characters' heads and conversations. Yet again, the machinations of bureaucrats loom large in the success or failure of our heroes, but the motivations have changed post-9/11. Perhaps the best part of the book is that one never knows what is true and what is hypothesis, pointing out the crux of the problem in today's "intelligence." How can one make accurate, appropriat...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Mitch rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've had mixed feelings about Le Carre since The Russia House (1989). However, as a back cover blurb states, this is "a first-class novel about the most pressing moral and political concerns of our time." No argument here. There are three main characters -- a beautiful female lawyer, a worn-out expat private banker, and a scruffy street smart spy -- but no real protagonist as the real center of the novel is the system. In retrospect, the ending seemed preordained, but all credit to Le Carre for...more

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Feb 19, 2011 Tim Pendry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british, espionage, thriller

John Le Carre defined the Cold War thriller but he has since become a writer of liberal-minded fictional critiques of the cynical and confused world of post-Soviet security. They are worthy but not classics - the heart is on the sleeve, we are supposed to be outraged and that is about that.

This story is no exception but its precise subject matter would give the game away and that is not something that you do with thrillers. Suffice it to say that we are talking about the war on terror ...

There h...more

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Oct 24, 2008 Corny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: thrillers

This is not vintage Le Carre, not that we are likely to see vintage Le Carre again, with the author approaching 80. My standard for judging him is "The Honourable Schoolboy" which along with the rest of the trilogy constitute the finest spy novels I have ever read.
It seems he ran out of material once the Russians left the stage. Either that or the characters are simply not as compelling because he is no longer writing about "what he knows." The center of this stage is the aging Tommy Brue, not m...more

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Oct 03, 2008 Foodpie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A Most Wanted Man continues Le Carres exploration of the complex, often painful world of the post soviet intelligence community. Following the journey of a young man named Issa as he pursues his patrimony in Germany and unravels the lives of everyone involved in the process, A Most Wanted Man is as much a story of delayed judgment and unreserved conclusions as it is a spy novel. For those who have sinned there is no escape, not even in death. Secrets will be revealed, stories told, and the full...more

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Jun 11, 2013 Brick rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very thoughtful story, combining a mannered description of an older and jaded expatriate British banker, a ferociously dedicated young woman lawyer, good hearted Turkish immigrants, an illegal refugee fleeing torture in Turkey and Russia. What could go wrong?

The national security apparatus of several countries, Turkey, Russia, Germany, and especially the United States, combine to grind all of these folks to dust, while well aware of their innocence of the acts of which they are variously accu...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: thriller, literary

A Most Wanted Return to Form by a Great Writer

Le Carré, J. (2008). A Most Wanted Man. New York: Scribner.

Le Carré is back. This novel gives fans the classic style, dialog, character and plot devices we have come to love from stories like A Perfect Spy, and The Night Manager, and deeply insightful dialog reminiscent of Little Drummer Girl. This one is a significant cut above his last venture, The Mission Song.

Tommy Brue is an aging British banker, head of Brue-Frères, a small family-run bank in G...more A Most Wanted Return to Form by a Great Writer

Le Carré, J. (2008). A Most Wanted Man. New York: Scribner.

Le Carré is back. This novel gives fans the classic style, dialog, character and plot devices we have come to love from stories like A Perfect Spy, and The Night Manager, and deeply insightful dialog reminiscent of Little Drummer Girl. This one is a significant cut above his last venture, The Mission Song.

Tommy Brue is an aging British banker, head of Brue-Frères, a small family-run bank in Germany that has seen better days, but even as it teeters on insolvency, it provides him with the pride of tradition and unimpeachable probity. Yet he is depressed, worn-out, clinging to form. (If only Alec Guiness were still alive...) Brue's trophy wife is having an open affair, and in the course of time will demand a divorce. He is estranged from his daughter who lives in California.

Into this dreary life comes a mysterious woman, a German lawyer who works for a nonprofit that supports political refugees. Her client, a young Chechen boy, would like to claim his inheritance, which the bank holds in its vault. Tommy knows the account is one of the money-laundering deposits his father shamefully accepted when millions were siphoned from Russian coffers by oligarchs, generals, and politicians when the Soviet Union collapsed. The bank can hardly afford to lose the asset, but the young boy has the safety deposit key, so nothing can be done.

We learn that this young Chechen is fiercely sought by Russian and Chechen authorities, the Swedish government, the Germans, the British, and even the Americans. Is the boy a terrorist, intending to funnel the millions to Islamist radicals in the Middle East, or is he, as he claims, a desperate refugee from Russian oppression of activist Chechens? Should Tommy care one way or the other, or should he simply perform his duty for a legitimate bank client? A complicated operation is mounted by British counterterrorism agents to find out what’s up, and Tommy is recruited into it, with deep reservations.

The plot is engaging, if a bit slow to develop, but what makes the book so satisfying is Le Carré’s fine writing. For example, a seemingly innocuous meeting takes place between Tommy and two businessmen, and only afterward do we get details: “…Brue struggled to remember what on earth they had talked about for so long before the bombshell hit. They did mutual friends in London, and probably, but not certainly, it occurred to Brue that the mutual friends knew Foreman rather better than Foreman knew the mutual friends. But if so, he made little of it. People who networked did it all the time. There was nothing sinister about it. He said he supposed they should be talking business, although neither of his hosts seemed in any hurry to do so. And he’d done his usual material about the integrity and soundness of Frères, and duly speculated about whether Wall Street was in adequate health, what with the subprime mortgage stuff – Frères, thank God had trodden warily on that front! …[These were] subjects in which Brue was tolerably well-versed from his reading of the financial prints, but about which in reality he had no opinion whatever: a fact that enabled him to indulge in further musing about Annabel Richter without troubling his audience.”

This is masterful writing, especially in its manipulation of point of view. The omniscient narrator is ascendant, but soon we are back in Brue’s Joycean mind.

Much later in an intelligence meeting, one of the operatives is enduring others’ stupidity and thinking: “...that was another lecture Bachmann would have dearly loved to give to these swiftly risen managers of the post-9/11 boom market in intelligence and allied trades… It warned them that however many of the latest spies’ wonder toys they had in their cupboards, however many magic codes they broke and hot-signals chatter they listened to, and brilliant deductions they pulled out of the ether regarding the enemy’s organizational structures, or lack of them, and internecine fights they had, and however many tame journalists were vying to trade their questionable gems of knowledge for slanted tip-offs and something for the back pocket, in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who’s been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth.”

That second sentence of 139 words is a work of art in its own right, full of vivid imagery, sophisticated meaning, and pleasing rhythm. I like spies and shadowy European scenery, and British dialog, and the thriller format of slowly emerging clarity, but Le Carré is the only writer in the genre who can deliver it so beautifully.(less)

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Mar 12, 2013 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Originally published on my blog here in August 2009.

Issa is, or claims to be, many contradictory people. A beggar sleeping on the Hamburg streets with thousands of euros in the purse around his neck. A Chechen imprisoned and tortured by the Russians, but with a KGB officer father. A devout Muslim, who doesn't seem to know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite, or how to show proper reverence to a copy of the Koran. Son of an important (if shady) customer of a small bank in Hamburg to make con...more Originally published on my blog here in August 2009.

Issa is, or claims to be, many contradictory people. A beggar sleeping on the Hamburg streets with thousands of euros in the purse around his neck. A Chechen imprisoned and tortured by the Russians, but with a KGB officer father. A devout Muslim, who doesn't seem to know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite, or how to show proper reverence to a copy of the Koran. Son of an important (if shady) customer of a small bank in Hamburg to make contact with the current head of Brue Frères, but not to claim the fortune which is his inheritance. An illegal immigrant, wanted by the Swedish police, who makes himself conspicuous to the German intelligence services on arrival in the country rather than lying low, with the result that he is immediately suspected of being a terrorist.

There are two people on his side. Annabel Richter, a young radical lawyer (in the pre-9/11 sense of "radical"), is assigned to Issa's case by Sanctuary, the refugee charity she works for. And Tommy Brue, respectable proprietor of the family bank. Neither entirely trusts Issa, but both feel the need to help him as much as they can.

Le Carré's last three novels (The Constant Gardener, The Mission Song, and this) share a common theme. They all seek to expose something of his view of the institutional immorality of the West's dealings with the rest of the world. Whether or not you agree with him (and to what extent), he makes what he has to say interesting and gripping. And it is sincere: this is a novel byt someone very angry. What angers him here is the American attitude to terrorist suspects. As one of the characters says at the end, Le Carré's point is that "American justice", which the US makes so much of, has become "extraordinary rendition".

I personally would still hope that not every institution is as morally bankrupt as Le Carré portrays them to be. But surely no one can deny that there is something in Le Carré's position, and that the author's anger is shared by many people from outside the privileged Western nations.

Themes which go back further in Le Carré's work are seen here, too. The troubled relationships between father an son, which are important in many of his novels, are seen here in both Brue and Issa's feelings for their dead parents. Issa also exemplifies the author's interest in the untrustworthiness of people's public personas. The tone of world weariness in the prose is common to many, perhaps all, of his novels.

While A Most Wanted Man was enjoyable on its own, I do find that with Le Carré a little goes a long way. If I read several of his novels in quick succession, the depressing tone which is so much a trademark becomes tiring. So I would tend to rate his novels higher when I read them sporadically.(less)

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Mar 05, 2013 J rated it 3 of 5 stars

This story in two words: extraordinary rendition.

I was taken in by the blurbs for this book that I read on the back of another LeCarre novel that I loved, namely "Our Kind of Traitor."

The blurbs talked about LeCarre's intricate plotting, word mastery, nuanced characters, etc. But this story left me cold.

I just could not get ensnared by any character's loveability or righteousness. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this. Or maybe that was LeCarre's point that all the characters were slimy and c...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: thriller

This isn't the Le Carre of the Smiley novels. Here he deals with the war on terror and I think he is missing the cold war because it goesn't really work.
The main character Issa, is a Chechen Muslim (supposedly) smuggled into Germany. He is in contact with a lawyer Annabel (young, attractive and left leaning, of course) Issa has business with Tommy Brue, a British, 60 year old banker whose has money put aside for Issa (long story). Floating around theses three are a couple of Turkish muslims, wh...more

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Jul 21, 2012 Steve rated it 2 of 5 stars

John Le Carre is an author whose books I have read over a number of years, A Murder Of Quality, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and then the trilogy that made him a household name. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. And it here I have a problem, I have an affinity with George Smiley's character, Le Carre created a kind of unsung hero of the British tradition. Clever, quiet, even reserved, articulate and damn good at what he was, loyal, he never doubted C...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Jeremy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Caveat emptor: this review is mildly spoilery, in a broad, non-specific way.

John Le Carre does a lot of things very well, like create dense, fascinating plots, and characters that are interesting and feel complex and plausible. A Most Wanted Man has all of that, but I found myself dissatisfied at the very end. Not in the cynical, Le Carre-ian way, where you come to realize that nothing truly positive can come from international intelligence operations (though there was some of that, for sure), b...more

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Apr 07, 2012 Marvin Goodman rated it 2 of 5 stars

I have been a loyal fan of LeCarre since reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold as a young lad, and have eagerly read just about everything he's written along the way. I wonder if the gradual decline of my impression of his offerings is more a result of how I've changed or how the world he writes about has changed. Every year I force myself to wait one more year before going back to read the magical novels of my youth: "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," "The Honourable Schoolboy," "A Small...more I have been a loyal fan of LeCarre since reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold as a young lad, and have eagerly read just about everything he's written along the way. I wonder if the gradual decline of my impression of his offerings is more a result of how I've changed or how the world he writes about has changed. Every year I force myself to wait one more year before going back to read the magical novels of my youth: "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," "The Honourable Schoolboy," "A Small Town in Germany," etc. At first, I wanted to wait until I had forgotten every detail of them, so they would be brand new to me again. Now, I wonder if I hesitate because I fear that they won't seem as good to me now as they did then. Ah, that's balderdash. Those books were wonderful, as millions of fans and reviews can attest, so I have nothing to fear there I suppose. And perhaps "A Most Wanted Man" was wonderful too, but I just didn't get it.

I enjoyed the description of post 9/11 spycraft and intelligence work,and the banking/financing angles were interesting (although not terribly complicated or mysterious, I thought). Even Tommy Brue was a proper LeCarre "hero," cut from the emotional mold of George Smiley. My problem was with the main character Issa, the displaced and ludicrously simple Chechen with bloodlines that surely damage one of the main premises by being more common than LeCarre leads us to believe. Annabel was never developed in such a way that would explain, to me, Brue's fascination with her, nor was the sexual or emotion tension between them believable to me on any level. I think that Issa was supposed to induce some sympathy in me, but either through my own ignorance or subconscious prejudices, or LeCarre's failure, he most assuredly did not, so I hardly cared what happened to him as the story progressed.

Perhaps the ludicrously clownish portrayal of the Turk, Melik, and his mother, Leyla, so disappointed me that I turned a sneerful indifference toward every character that came after them. If there's a harsh criticism to be made of this effort, I believe it is the character Melik. I was convinced that I was reading about an addled giant from a 1960's Disney movie, a cartoonish cliche. It took all of the discipline I had to keep reading past the time that Issa spent with them.

I've still not read LeCarre's most recent book, "Our Kind of Traitor," although it's sitting on my shelf. I'm afraid to now, fearful that LeCarre's stories no longer speak to me.(less)

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Jan 09, 2012 Juanita Rice rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

John LeCarre’s novels are wonderful “spy stories” but they are far more than that, although they always incorporate the machinations and the people caught up in world power struggles. At their best they are stories of complex personalities, often inimitable and distinct, even idiosyncratic, and the interplay between the personal and the political, how it is that the ideological interacts with a specific emotional component in particular class and historical moments.

His early ones were primarily...more
John LeCarre’s novels are wonderful “spy stories” but they are far more than that, although they always incorporate the machinations and the people caught up in world power struggles. At their best they are stories of complex personalities, often inimitable and distinct, even idiosyncratic, and the interplay between the personal and the political, how it is that the ideological interacts with a specific emotional component in particular class and historical moments.

His early ones were primarily about the intelligence agencies in the Cold War between the USSR and the UK (with crass interference by the “American Cousins"). Since Perestroika, Glasnost, and the de-communizing of the USSR, LeCarre’s plots have evolved to follow more current, and always poignant, issues: corporate corruption under World Trade Organization policies, post-liberation Africa, and conflicts involving the vast Islamic turmoil of the last twenty years. In A Most Wanted Man, 2008, the plot turns on whether a young illegal immigrant more or less smuggled into Germany can find asylum as a Chechnyan victim of the Russian/Chechnyan struggles in which he was tortured as a prisoner, or whether Western anti-terrorist forces will claim him as a purported Islamic terrorist threat to Europe/US.

Research for this novel is impressive; the fictional activist organization Sanctuary North, a legal aid society for asylum-seekers in Germany, is constructed on the actual working groups flucht*punkt in Hamburg, and Reprieve in the UK. It functions textually the way a similar German activist organization did in Constant Gardener, as a source of insight into the non-governmental intervention that today serves as the main source of humanitarian aid in the world, and as a technical means of handling exposition of the abuses caused by callous and corrupt governments and corporations. In Most Wanted Man, Annabel Richter is a young lawyer from Sanctuary North who intervenes on behalf of the Chechnyan asylum-seeker, Issa. The plot is complicated by Issa’s broken person itself, alternately terrified and deluded with grandeur; besides that, his sense of Islamic propriety forces a disorienting template on their relationship for her. Since she is granted private access to him, he fantasizes that he will convert her and marry her, and her careful maneuvering between respecting his attitudes, humoring his obsessions, and maintaining her own autonomy threaten the clarity of her work to get him to safety.

By the way, in constructing the person of Annabel Richter and several other female characters who are active and capable in their own areas, notably Erna Frey, coworker and companion of the male hero Gunther Bachman, Le Carre has come a long way from the women of his early books who were only wives, girlfriends or ex-wives functioning primarily to have hysterics which the heroes could slap them out of.

In the end the plot enacts a struggle over American powers of “Rendition,” the extra-judicial proceedings that allow/ed the most powerful country in the world to dispose of people they suspect/ed, more or less however they wish. And not with respect or humanity. In high-level negotiations, a German jokes with an American agent: “Which of your courts are we talking about here, Martha? Your military tribunals behind closed doors, or the old sort when the accused was allowed to know what he was accused of?” The difference between these courts is the difference that LeCarre researched through flucht-punkt and Reprieve, and the legal perspective of such worthies as Bernhard Docke, “the pro bono legal representative of Murat Kurnaz, the Turkish German Muslim unjust imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for four and a half years.”

For LeCarre writes fiction, yes; but fiction about the lives and actions behind the fictions we usually maintain about “reality.” I don't rate his book as one of his best, but it was a worthy and real issue. LeCarre’s version of the American ideology behind post-9/11 “extraordinary rendition” stings with its very accent of hatred and disrespect: “American justice, asshole. Whose do you think? Justice from the fucking hip, man. No-crap justice, that kind of justice! Justice with no fucking lawyers around to pervert the course.” The American continues: “Eye for a fucking eye, Gunther. Justice as retribution, okay? Abdullah was killing Americans. We call that original sin. You want to play softball spy games? Go find yourself some Euro-pygmies.”

If you’ve read LeCarre, you know he doesn’t often descend to language like this—“fucking, ass-hole, no-crap.” Not even for his frequent American tough-guys. The war on terror, it seems, has brought even John LeCarre to look honestly at U.S. military/conservative attitudes. When the first President Bush talked about “kicking butt,” the capacity of novelists to write about American politics and military in polite language was severely impaired. This is the language of Syriana, of Body of Lies, of The Departed. It’s Tea-Party language. It’s inevitable, because we know it. We recognize that attitude, that phrasing, that abrasive raw aggression. With his usual gift for dialogue, LeCarre has nailed it without excess vulgarity: it's exactly the language of the Free American who doesn't give a Fig for Freedom, Equality, or Justice: he just wants to be free to fuck someone over, because he's feeling especially mean.

LeCarre is a true virtuoso at evoking suspense and the palpable presence of danger. Unfortunately, the level of foreboding in A Most Wanted Man outweighed the suspense for me, as in Tailor of Panama which I never finished because the darkness of the plot filled me with dread, or The Night Manager, which I did finish but promptly erased from memory. I almost abandoned this book because of the pitifully traumatized character of Issa and the sense that LeCarre’s honesty would not allow a happy ending for someone in such straits. His books which I most enjoy usually stage memorable characters. The most famous of these characters perhaps is the recurring George Smiley, "dumpy" British secret services operative devoid of both vanity and fanaticism. Certainly the vivid characters of A Constant Gardener are another example, especially if you saw the riveting film performances of Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz as the British Diplomat in contemporary Africa and his activist wife who is brutally killed as she uncovers illicit drug trials in Africa. Jerry Westerby of The Honourable Schoolboy will linger in my mind long after the convoluted but riveting plot has dissolved into lost memory. Above all, I still cherish the characters of A Perfect Spy—the poignant “brilliant Brit” Magnus Pym, his con-man father Rick, his surrogate fathers the British agent Brotherhood and the Czech counterpart Axel (“Poppy”), Pym’s wife Mary, son Tom, and all the momentary figures of the long history—Sabina, Colonel and Mrs. Membury, the Baroness Rothschild, Syd and his stolid wife.

What I’m leading up to is the absence of similarly powerful personalities in A Most Wanted Man. LeCarre failed, I think, to get the inner life of Issa into any kind of focus; Annabel and the banker Tommy Brue have some interest and depth, but I never even got straight who the main character was as a person. Yes, Gunther Bachman is honest, straightforward, smart; he’s a German intelligence officer who never rose to the top although he is, we are given to believe, as good as they come. Maybe he’s too honest, too sincere. But about two-thirds of the way through the plot I was suddenly overwhelmed by a welter of German, British, and American functionaries, and I never succeeded in attaching names or faces to half of them, let alone their relative powers or functions: Mohr, Keller, Axelrod, Martha, Newton, Zimmerman, Burgdorf, Lantern. All we know is that it looks bad for the crazy sad kid Issa, and maybe anyone who gets in the way.
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Jan 03, 2012 Alex Goldstein rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

На днях закончил читать новую книжку Ле Карре. Купил ее наобум, в книжном магазине аэропорта. На обложке была рецензия из New York Times, что, дескать, это одно из сильнейших его произведений. Я до этого читал "Шпиона, который вернулся с холода" и "Маленькую барабанщицу", мне тогда понравилось.
Действие происходит в 2007 году, война с террором идет в полную силу, Гамбург, немецкая и английская разведка гоняются за потенциальными террористами. В центре некий молодой парень неясной судьбы, то ли т...more На днях закончил читать новую книжку Ле Карре. Купил ее наобум, в книжном магазине аэропорта. На обложке была рецензия из New York Times, что, дескать, это одно из сильнейших его произведений. Я до этого читал "Шпиона, который вернулся с холода" и "Маленькую барабанщицу", мне тогда понравилось.
Действие происходит в 2007 году, война с террором идет в полную силу, Гамбург, немецкая и английская разведка гоняются за потенциальными террористами. В центре некий молодой парень неясной судьбы, то ли террорист, то ли жертва. Пылкая молодая адвокатша пытается ему помочь, старый английский банкир-прохвост влюбляется в адвокатшу и тоже хочет помочь, немецкая и английская разведка плетут хитроумные планы как бы через парня внедриться в Аль-Каиду, в конце появляются ЦРУшники и все резко опошляют - всех мусульман хватают и забирают в Гуантанамо. Все планы адвокатши/банкира/МИ-6/немецкой разведки, которые в подробностях описывались на протяжении 400-х страниц, рассыпаются под напором безликой и тупой американской военщины. Смысл книги - американцы козлы. Написано очень нудно и затянуто, сюжет закручен до невозможности, а развязки в конце книги нет, все загадки так и остаются загадками.
Удивительная несуразность в сюжете - главный герой является сыном русского полковника и изнасилованной полковником чеченской девушки. Действие книги происходит в 2007 году, парню в это время 22-23 года. Я пол-книги пытался понять почему в 1984 году русские полковники насиловали чеченских девушек, и не понял. Афганских, это еще может быть, но почему чеченских?
В общем больше я к Ле Карре не подхожу.(less)

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Sep 23, 2011 Marie-Jo Fortis rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had seen years ago adaptations of Le Carré's novels on PBS. I remember I was not too familiar with the English language then, being a young immigrant from France. To the young girl that I was, a spy movie was a James Bond movie. Fast paced, humorous. And what did I get instead? A Balzac of sorts examining the mechanisms of the undercover world. I didn't expect the slowness, the introspection. The subtlety. And subtlety is tough when you're none too familiar with a language, as I mentioned abov...more I had seen years ago adaptations of Le Carré's novels on PBS. I remember I was not too familiar with the English language then, being a young immigrant from France. To the young girl that I was, a spy movie was a James Bond movie. Fast paced, humorous. And what did I get instead? A Balzac of sorts examining the mechanisms of the undercover world. I didn't expect the slowness, the introspection. The subtlety. And subtlety is tough when you're none too familiar with a language, as I mentioned above.

So I was intrigued by Le Carré, but I abandoned him. Or, should I say, I let Le Carré be. Maybe we'll meet again, I thought. Hopefully we will.

And we did. When during one of my trips I saw A Most Wanted Man on a bookstore shelf at the Pittsburgh airport, I decided to grab it. I had other readings in waiting, so the book waited patiently, as only books know how.

And then it was time. Would I like Le Carré? Would I be disappointed? Would there be a distance between his world and my reading? Would I plunge right into his universe?

The fact is, I was seduced by Le Carré's prose from the very start. It is elegant, mysterious. It is a long walk into the night. Incidentally, night is a crucial element in this novel.

The story, a Russian Muslim who seeks refuge in Germany and is defended by a beautiful civil rights lawyer, is what caught my attention at first. What maintained my interest was the superb way Le Carré is able to weave the personal with the political, without rushing anything. He writes like a spider, catches the reader in his web. At the same time, he adds layer upon layer of issues: immigration, love --both reciprocated and unreciprocated; the chicanery, duplicity, cruelty and/or brutality of international secret services. Not only do they trick the innocent, but they trick each other, or vice versa.

So, of course, don't expect to dance the cha-cha-cha as soon as you finish the book. But reading a good book does not necessarily equate a trip to Disneyworld.

Is there some weakness in the novel? It is debatable. Personally, I have trouble believing in the attraction the lawyer, who is a modern young woman, has for such a traditional Muslim young man who doesn't see women as equal to men. But within his religious assertions the young man is vulnerable, and touching. Furthermore, Le Carré suggests that, on the sentimental level, our beautiful lawyer is troubled, lost. Now, if this love is to be taken on the metaphoric level, as compassion toward immigrants, as an all encompassing humanitarian love, then the weakness just mentioned is no longer a weakness but an additional strength. The poignancy lies in the fact that governments and their spying minions have absolutely no respect for what makes us humans. In the end, it is not our tragedy, but theirs. (less)

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Feb 21, 2011 Roy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Le Carre made his name writing Cold War spy novels, but in the 90s, it seemed his field of expertise had dried up, relegating all of his stories to corporate espionage – a broad field but not as gut-wrenchingly life-or-death as international intelligence work. Then radical Muslim fundamentalists stepped onto the world scene, saving thousands of government spy jobs and providing new fertile ground for fictional espionage.

However, this new world is murky. Who is good? Who is bad? How bad are they...more Le Carre made his name writing Cold War spy novels, but in the 90s, it seemed his field of expertise had dried up, relegating all of his stories to corporate espionage – a broad field but not as gut-wrenchingly life-or-death as international intelligence work. Then radical Muslim fundamentalists stepped onto the world scene, saving thousands of government spy jobs and providing new fertile ground for fictional espionage.

However, this new world is murky. Who is good? Who is bad? How bad are they? As I write this, in the non-fiction world, autocratic rulers are being challenged throughout the Muslim world and it is hard to tell if these changes will be good or bad for the US. The world is a multi-polar mess.

In his world, Le Carre is still able to build a neat package of competing agents, targets, handlers and sources. It’s hard for a layperson to grasp how the war on terror really works, but A Most Wanted Man does a great job of showing the modern spy apparatus as it tries to reformat itself to a new enemy. It is a game with new rules, and Le Carre shows that some of the biggest battles are internal to the various western agencies as they all try to figure out what they are doing. The main spy, Gunther, has to play a delicate game just to win approval from his various higher-ups so that he can follow through with his mission.

The other half (possibly two-thirds) of this novel is spent with a human-rights lawyer, her client, and a banker that may be able to help them. Annabel, the lawyer, is only a few years into her career and is simultaneously trying to win respect from her family and find her role as an advocate for the needy. Brue, the banker, lives a comfortable life, but it is built on a foundation with an illicit crack. Issa, a mysterious refuge on the run, was problematic for me. In creating a damaged, mal-developed victim, Le Carre has given us a character with a shaky grasp on reality. With his lack of motivation and guile, Issa becomes an object, rather than a character to progress the action. This is done intentionally, but it leads to a lot of frustrating scenes involving one of the main characters who seemingly does not know what he wants or how to get it.

One of the reasons why turned to this book was the recent Wiki-leaks story. We have been flooded with thousands of examples of real-time statecraft. The New York Times has pieced together these documents into revealing stories, but only Le Carre's fiction can go even deeper into a shrouded world that can’t ever be fully documented or revealed.(less)

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Jan 16, 2011 Stephen Clynes rated it 4 of 5 stars

This novel has 416 pages and was written in 2008 and published in paperback in 2009. It is a realistic tale about the international war on terror. John le Carre's writing style is very polished and uses a very large vocabulary. This story develops at a good pace with a well developed plot. You may think that Islam and the war on terror are difficult subjects to write a novel about but John le Carre has done such good research that the realities of this story read like a dream. John writes with s...more This novel has 416 pages and was written in 2008 and published in paperback in 2009. It is a realistic tale about the international war on terror. John le Carre's writing style is very polished and uses a very large vocabulary. This story develops at a good pace with a well developed plot. You may think that Islam and the war on terror are difficult subjects to write a novel about but John le Carre has done such good research that the realities of this story read like a dream. John writes with such a neutral balance about the war on terror that it makes this story so easy for the reader to follow.

The reader gets and understands the whole picture of everyone just trying to do their little bit and the right thing. The banker, the lawyer, the Turkish Muslim family and the intelligence community are all trying to do their best for Issa Karpov. John explains how counter terrorism agencies do their work and describes how good interview techniques can bring good results. As the story develops you begin to wonder about Issa Karpov and you start to have your own doubts about him. A few things do not add up and you wonder how much of the truth he is telling everyone, is he genuine or a fraud, is he a criminal or a terrorist?

Throughout this novel there are plenty of moral and political issues that the reader is forced to think about and form their own opinion. All the characters in this story are well developed and by the end of this book you reach a very sad ending and feel that all the characters have been betrayed. You are left with a sense of loss as you close this book and think back about it all. You then wonder who is winning the war on terror and how the work of many professionals can go to waste due to their country's special relationship with America.

I think that A Most Wanted Man is a good book and I shall be voting it 4 stars on goodreads . I rather enjoyed watching the More 4 documentary broadcast on Friday 10th December 2010, when Jon Snow interviewed John le Carre at his home in Cornwall. I saw this television programme before I started reading this book and John's voice does come out in the book as the character Gunther Bachmann of the German intelligence service. Because of John's old real life day-job as an intelligence officer with MI5 and MI6, you can be sure that his novels reflect real life rather than fantasy. John le Carre is an author of the old school, writing his novels in longhand using a pen and paper. He then edits his draft and tears the paper before using staples to piece his sections together. I was very surprised to watch this old school style writing technique on television but his finished books demonstrate just what a first class author John le Carre actually is.(less)

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Jan 01, 2011 Jim Leffert rated it 3 of 5 stars

A.B. Yehoshua once remarked that war has a pernicious effect on literature by leading writers to produce morally strident works. One of the remarkable qualities of John Le Carre’s earlier novels, which made his reputation, was that the Cold War didn’t have this effect on him—in his morally ambiguous novels, even the bad guys were sympathetic. He depicted flawed but likeable characters on both sides of the fence, so that regardless of what team a character played for, he would present a mixture o...more

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Dec 06, 2010 Abe rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another fairly low-key effort by Le Carre. By this I mean that, while enjoyable at the level of character and style, and to a lesser extent plotting, the novel didn’t deal with major themes or ideas. It was more just a small study of the effect of the so-called war on terror on the lives of some fairly innocent players.

The setting was entirely in Hamburg. Not only is this a city I’m totally unfamiliar with and have no particular affinity for, but it also says a lot when a Le Carre novel can be c...more

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Sep 13, 2010 Ann rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the best spy novels I've ever read. LeCarre writes with an exquisite economy; there is not a wasted passage. Though the author is intimate with the spy game and has done much research for this book the reader is never oppressed with pages of research as in so many other books by so many other authors for which much research was done. Every sentence moves the story along and the art with which the author makes the reader think is brilliant.
This is a timely story of post 9/11 frantic terror...more

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Aug 16, 2010 Brian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

John Le Carre’s Smiley novels are unquestionably masterpieces. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union history pulled the carpet away from beneath him; since then he seems to have lost his relevance and is in danger of producing pastiches of himself.

There’s nothing new about A Most Wanted Man. Though it’s subject is ostensibly the war on terror, the plot is familiar Le Carre territory: inter-service rivalry, complicated financial transactions, the impossibility of old-fashioned values in...more

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Jul 05, 2010 Jason Lemons rated it 3 of 5 stars

An intriguing book about post-9/11 spying. The plot is primarily character driven and not a prototypical action spy novel, but that is what I have come to expect from JLC. However, in this case the intrigue is just enough to keep me reading and not quite enough to make the book engaging. It is no as bad as single and single, but nowhere near as fascinating as Tinker, Tailor... The book peaks when it is describing the difficulties of defining evil as it is represented by the shadowy networks that...more

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Jun 25, 2010 Bonnie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this book to be interesting, but ended rather enigmatically without too much answered. Issa (I'm not sure of the spelling since I listened to an audiobook) is a Chechen smuggled into Hamburg, Germany. He has been imprisoned and tortured in Russia and Turkey as a Chechen terrorist. But whether he actually is one or only suspected of being one, is never really answered. One is left with the idea that he isn't. He is taken in by a Turkish widow and her prizefighter son who pass him on to a...more

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Apr 19, 2010 Yngvild rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: espionage

A Most Wanted Man is the most demanding of John le Carré’s spy stories so far, maybe too demanding. I read fiction for relaxation, and this is not a relaxing read where, after being fed a bread crumb trail of clues, all is revealed in the last chapter.

There are the predictable stereotypical characters of a political spy novel: the Birkenstock-wearing liberal German woman lawyer; the lascivious middle-aged British banker with a disreputable father; and the usual assortment of thugs and bureaucrat...more

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