Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Oct 23, 2008

Chuckell rated it:

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.

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Nov 27, 2008

Mary rated it:

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...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jun 26, 2008

Eno rated it:

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.

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 15, 2008

Erik rated it:

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.

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2011

Kate rated it:

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 accura More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 24, 2008

Corny rated it:

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 t More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 03, 2008

Foodpie rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 24, 2008

Jason rated it:

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 cha More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2008

Tony rated it:

Le Carre, John. A MOST WANTED MAN. (2008). ***. Despite all the great reviews this novel got for LeCarre, I thought it was rather boring. It’s really about the internal and intermural rivalries that go on among various security agencies from various countries, spawned by 9/11. The story is set in Hamburg, and begins when a refugee from Chechnia shows up seeking asylum with a Turkish family living in the city. He is an emaciated young man who has arrived illegally in Germany via Denmark, S More...

0 comments like

Jan 09, 2012

Juanita rated it:

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 o More...

2 comments like

Jan 03, 2012

Alex rated it:

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 парен More...

0 comments like

Sep 23, 2011

Marie-jo rated it:

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...

0 comments like

Jun 05, 2011

Mitch rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like

Feb 21, 2011

Roy rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like

Feb 19, 2011

Tim rated it:

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 terro More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 16, 2011

Stephen rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 01, 2011

Jim rated it:

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...

0 comments like

Dec 06, 2010

Abe rated it:

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 n More...

0 comments like

Sep 13, 2010

Ann rated it:

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 frant More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 16, 2010

Brian rated it:

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-fashion More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2010

Jason rated it:

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...

0 comments like

Jun 25, 2010

Bonnie rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like

Apr 19, 2010

Yngvild rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 12, 2010

Stan rated it:

One of my favorite authors, Le Carre could never be accused of writing a fast-paced novel. This, his latest, is downright slow -- especially in the first half of the book. Whereas I usually luxuriate in the precision and languor of his writing, this time it just seemed tedious and dull. The main characters are interesting enough: Issa, Muslim terrorist vs. innocent prisoner brutally broken with torture; Annabel, pro bono lawyer crusading to save him; and Brue, private banker, "a lonely rich More...

0 comments like

Jan 24, 2010

AJ rated it:

John le Carre is a brilliant writer. And he sure is pissed off at post-Cold War Western governments. I am not unhappy with this: he is clearly a man who needs a reason to write and if he had been unable to find one after the Berlin Wall fell, then it would have been a tragic loss for Literature. But the heavy-handedness of his political opinions can occasionally go over the top, even for me, and I am someone who agrees with him. In A Most Wanted Man, happily, the heavy-handedness is almost entir More...

0 comments like

Jan 01, 2010

Gerald rated it:

In common with other readers, I was losing faith in the author of the incomparable Smiley novels. The Constant Gardener, Mission Song, Single and Single suggested a forlorn search for unexplored territory. Now, with one bound, our hero has liberated himself - or, rather, rediscovered himself in the dark, duplicitous recesses of the international intelligence community. Wonderfully, although all the old la Carré characteristics remain, they belong in a very modern world of terrorism with a bankin More...

0 comments like

Nov 04, 2009

Tony rated it:

I have to admit I haven't read any Le Carré in years -- and after this book, I doubt I will for years to come. In simple terms, it's the story of a half-Chechen illegal immigrant in Hamburg who is trying to lay claim on the considerable loot his dead father (a Russian military officer) salted away in a private bank. He manages to find legal aid in the form of a humorless, well-connected female lawyer, who acts as his intermediary in discussions with the 60ish English banker who controls this " More...

0 comments like

Aug 16, 2009

Miami University rated it:

After enjoying "The Mission Song" and "The Constant Gardener," two very fine novels that have helped make John Le Carre even more relevant as a writer of espionage and institutional morality in the post-Cold War world, I found it hard not to be a bit disappointed in "A Most Wanted Man." All the elements of success are here: Le Carre's pitch-perfect dialogue, his sharply rendered characters, and his remarkable ability to make the headiest of topics digestible to a po More...

0 comments like

May 25, 2009

Christine rated it:

There is a reason Le Carre is called the master of the spy novel. Even with the changing complexities of the international scene, his finger is firmly on the pulse of the intelligence community and the new challenges they face. In this novel, he highlights not only the increasingly complex problem of sorting out the terrorists from the merely devout Islamic community but also the challenges faced when competing spy agencies from several friendly countries become involved in a case. Le Carre hand More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 11, 2012

Sundarraj rated it:

Even when writing a novel based in a different era (post 9/11) John Le Carre manages to engage ones attention to what he wishes to say. The smells of John Le Carre are all over, but the perfume of "The Spy who came from the cold" is missing.
The book is about a chechnyian Muslim youth (son of a Russian Red Army General, now dead) suspected terrorist who comes to Hamburg to start a new life with the help of a Banker.
The British banker in question runs a bank that accepted inves More...

0 comments like