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A Perfect Spy

John le Carré

3.99 · Rating details · 15,939 ratings · 711 reviews

John le Carre's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

Immersing readers in two parallel dramas -- one about the making of a spy, the other chronicling his seemingly imminent demise -- le Carre offers one of his richest an ...more

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Paperback, 608 pages

Published December 31st 2002 by Scribner Book Company (first published March 12th 1986)

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Mar 24, 2020 Candi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: espionage, thriller

"Life is duty... It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you."

I’ve been reading John le Carré’s espionage novels like I would that little bag of my favorite dark chocolates that I hide in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator. Not one right after the other, because honestly, there are other treats I like to indulge in as well. There are the Reese’s peanut butter cups and the Trader Joe’s roasted pistachio toffe "Life is duty... It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you."

I’ve been reading John le Carré’s espionage novels like I would that little bag of my favorite dark chocolates that I hide in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator. Not one right after the other, because honestly, there are other treats I like to indulge in as well. There are the Reese’s peanut butter cups and the Trader Joe’s roasted pistachio toffee (dark chocolate as well, naturally.) But I like to make a good thing last, savor it a while, before dipping my hand back into the bag for another best of the best. In terms of books, rather than chocolate, I have to say that I don’t recall reading an author’s work in such relatively quick succession as I have since childhood when I devoured one mystery novel after another. Despite the fact I won’t share my favorite stash of candy, I have been more than happy to share the le Carré journey with a fabulous little group of women that have the same joy in reading these over the past year or more. The adventure has been that much more rewarding as a result.

It has always been a debate rather nature versus nurture shapes us more as a person. In the case of Magnus Pym, I think it would be safe to say that both contributed a significant piece. This is not so much an espionage thriller, though it is that too, but a reflection on a man’s life and how he was shaped for the role he plays. Magnus has been dubbed the perfect spy. His childhood was one of deceit and lies, yet he yearned for love and always aimed to please. He could just as easily have been the perfect actor. He managed to create and portray the character he felt each person wanted him to be.

"Magnus is a great imitator, even when he doesn’t know it. Really I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow."

My heart broke for the young Magnus Pym. The elder Pym was more of an enigma to me. By book’s end, I felt little sympathy for him any longer. He was groomed from an early age to work in the spy business. He was good at it. His talents did not go unnoticed. I believe his fate was sealed in one moment in time.

"In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of."

If you’ve ever read le Carré, you’ll know that his books are not bursting with action. The spy world is not the glamorous, fast-paced one that we see depicted in most films. Rather, what draws me to his work is the fine writing, the sharp analyses of the inner workings of the agent’s mind, and the intricate dynamics between the various characters. Yes, some action-filled scenes are appreciated. In A Perfect Spy, much of what happens is relayed to the reader after the fact. These are the musings of a hunted man on the run as he writes his own book about his past and what drove him to do the things he did. As a result, I felt a bit more distanced from the man himself. Much like I would feel being stuck in the back row of the theater. I understand what is going on, but I don’t feel like a part of the drama myself. Of course, I’m unfairly comparing this one to my last le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, which so completely absorbed me that I could not let it go for a number of weeks after finishing. The brilliant prose is still here, but the emotional pull was wanting. Don’t get me wrong though, even one of my least favorites by this best-loved author still ranks higher than most of what is out there right now!

"Love is whatever you can still betray... Betrayal can only happen if you love." ...more

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Sep 02, 2009 Helen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: espionage

Let me start this review with these words; this book is devastating. It is the best writing John Le Carre has ever done, and will ever do.

That's not to say that it's a better spy novel than Tinker Tailor or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; it's not. If spycraft is what you crave, it's here, but it definitely takes a back seat to everything else. In A Perfect Spy, Le Carre's writing rises easily to the level of the 20th Century's greatest authors.

After the death of his father, Magnus Pym, debo Let me start this review with these words; this book is devastating. It is the best writing John Le Carre has ever done, and will ever do.

That's not to say that it's a better spy novel than Tinker Tailor or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; it's not. If spycraft is what you crave, it's here, but it definitely takes a back seat to everything else. In A Perfect Spy, Le Carre's writing rises easily to the level of the 20th Century's greatest authors.

After the death of his father, Magnus Pym, debonair, flawless British spy, has disappeared with the station’s burn box. His wife, his son, his handlers, and his friends have no idea where he is, due to the fact that he has doled each of them a different piece of the truth. In the meantime, he has checked himself into a safe house, where he is determined to write a book that will set everything straight.

A Perfect Spy is largely autobiographical. Le Carre's mother vanished when he was three, in the same way that Pym loses his mother at an early age. Like Pym's father Rick, Le Carre’s father Ronnie Cornwell was a charismatic, larger-than-life con man who spent time in prison. When the young Le Carre wasn’t away at various boarding schools, (the tuition sometimes paid for with black market dried fruit), he was palling around with his father’s unsavory acquaintances. Like Pym, he worked for the British Secret Service in Switzerland and in Austria and attended Oxford. Pym is a gifted intelligence officer, but he tells everyone that what he really wants to do is write, and good God, how Le Carre writes.

At its heart, this is a book about a boy's relationship with his father. As a parent, I am achingly aware of my responsibility; children are fragile little creatures whose fates depend completely on the mercy of the adults who take care of them. For better and for worse, it is we who teach them what is right, or wrong, or normal. It's we who teach them how to love, and who to trust, it's we who twist and shape their vulnerable little psyches. And it is we who are capable of damaging them the most. Rick loves his son, and his son loves him, and it is painfully clear how this criminally self-absorbed and self-deluding narcissist destroys "the natural humanity" in little Magnus, turning him into the perfect spy of the title. How Le Carre was able to write this stuff down without wetting every page of the manuscript with his tears is a mystery to me.

With all that, the book is surprisingly funny, full of mocking self-deprecation and gorgeous British slang. The facts make wonderful fiction. There are hilarious letters from Rick to his son and lovingly recreated conversations between his father's business associates. It is also surprisingly sexy, as the young Pym navigates between lust and yearning, all things we don't expect from John Le Carre.

A Perfect Spy is a breathtaking act of catharsis, warm and funny, wry and rueful, unexpectedly, nakedly human. Instead of burying his painful past, Mr. Le Carre illuminates it for us as a masterpiece of fiction. Happily, he has come to terms with his father, resurrecting him for us with humor and with love. ...more

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Oct 16, 2011 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2013

“Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

description

Remembrances of loyalties past. In some of le Carré's novels you feel haunted by the ghosts of Conrad, Greene, Nabokov, etc. In 'The Perfect Spy', I went back and forth about whether le Carré was building this novel to be Dickensian spy novel or a Proustian spy novel.

I still haven't quite figured it out. All I know is that it worked. It was br ...more

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May 26, 2018 Warwick rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, austria, espionage, england, bern, switzerland, vienna, cold-war

Le Carré writes beautifully, let's get that out of the way straight off, but something about this left me a little disappointed. It did have a lot to live up to: not only is it often considered his best work, it's sometimes considered anyone's best work. Philip Pullman reckons A Perfect Spy is ‘one of the finest novels of the twentieth century’, while Philip Roth said it was ‘the best English novel since the war’. Other Philips also speak highly of it.

It begins with the arrival of a man in a sma Le Carré writes beautifully, let's get that out of the way straight off, but something about this left me a little disappointed. It did have a lot to live up to: not only is it often considered his best work, it's sometimes considered anyone's best work. Philip Pullman reckons A Perfect Spy is ‘one of the finest novels of the twentieth century’, while Philip Roth said it was ‘the best English novel since the war’. Other Philips also speak highly of it.

It begins with the arrival of a man in a small English village. He is using a false name, he is carrying a mysterious bag, he has apparently just come from a funeral. In a guest room, he sits down to write his story; and thenceforth the book alternates between an espionage thriller that crisscrosses Cold War Europe, and a personal narrative about growing up in postwar Britain.

I found the first of these strands considerably more interesting than the second, which is clearly based on le Carré's own childhood. The book therefore has much autobiographical interest (and had even more before 2016, when le Carré authorised a biography and then wrote his own). Like the book's protagonist, Magnus Pym, le Carré grew up without a mother and in the shadow of a confused relationship with his conman father, and the dynamic of this relationship is a major focus of the novel. I mostly found it a distraction, and was anxious to get back to what I felt was the main story.

Part of the problem is that the two parts never really mesh very well. The idea mooted is that growing up with an overbearing confidence trickster as a father has predisposed Pym to a life of international espionage; well, le Carré may have felt this to be true in his own case, but I don't find it very convincing in this novel. It feels like two books have been stapled together.

It's particularly frustrating because the bits that work are so excellent: beautiful descriptions of Europe, in this case mostly Austria and Switzerland (‘the spiritual home of natural spies’), a flawless depiction of how diplomats track a potential defector, and the kind of perfect thumbnail character sketches that le Carré is so consistently good at:

She had greying hair bound in a sensible bun and wore a necklace of what looked like nutmeg. When she walked, she waded through her kaftan as if she hated it. When she sat, she spread her knees and scraped at the knuckles of one hand. Yet her beauty clung to her like an identity she was trying to deny and her plainness kept slipping like a bad disguise.

His books are always able to demonstrate exactly how politics boils down to conversations between frustrated people in drab meeting-rooms. The conversations in le Carré books are the set pieces: they are as exciting as car chases or fistfights, and this book is no different. Much hinges on the cagey relationship between British ‘espiocrats’ (to use one of le Carré's later coinages) and their CIA counterparts, and the author has a lot of fun contrasting the well-spoken, supercilious clarity of the Brits with the managerial jargon of the Americans:

‘…the ah Agency position overall on this thing – at this important meeting, and at this moment in time – is that we have here an accumulation of indicators from a wide range of sources on the one hand, and new data on the other which we consider pretty much conclusive in respect of our unease.’

(This is an affliction that has long since spread to this side of the Atlantic.) At moments like these, I felt inclined to give the book the benefit of the doubt, and was willing myself to like it more than I did. But the flashbacks were just too obtrusive and took too long to get to their point – things don't really get going until a third of the way in, which for a six-hundred-word book is a hell of a long time to make people wait. There is a sneaky sensation that the author was doing this more for himself than for us (he later talked about the book as therapy).

‘Love is whatever you can betray,’ reflects the main character. ‘Betrayal can only happen if you love.’ The theme of betrayal – to one's loved ones and to one's country – is a powerful one, even if I felt it got a bit smothered. The book is studded with brilliance – but not perfect, to me, by a long shot. ...more

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May 27, 2009 Wendy rated it did not like it

Shelves: unfinished

I picked up this book since it was on a list of most influential novels according to one of my issues of Mental Floss magazine, but I just couldn't force myself to get through it. I read about 100 pages of some of the most impenetrable prose, full of confusing switches in point of view, setting, and time period before I set it aside. The army of characters that dropped in like paratroopers made it hard to keep the names straight and at some point, I stopped trying. I just never got into the stor ...more

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Jul 01, 2009 Lewis Weinstein rated it it was ok

Shelves: crime-and-thrillers

Years ago I read this and gave it 5*****. I tried to re-read it (it's included reading for our Oxford course next summer), but found it disjointed and extremely difficult to follow, with little in the way of cohesive plot. Occasional paragraphs/pages were full of tension and beautifully written but there were not enough of these. I put it aside after 142 pages.

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Feb 13, 2018 Quirkyreader rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This was a brilliant story. At first I wasn't going to give it any stars because it seemed more like a stream of consciousness story and not a novel as we know it. But as I got into the story and its flow, I got sucked in.

And this is a stand alone story. It has nothing to do with Smiley and The Circus. So if you have never read a LeCarre story before, this is a good introduction to his writing style.

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Mar 29, 2015 Bettie rated it really liked it

Shelves: spring-2015, tv, film-only, eng-devon, peru, published-1986, spies, mystery-thriller

Description: Magnus Pym -- son of Rick, father of Tom, and a successful career officer of British Intelligence -- has vanished, to the dismay of his friends, enemies, and wife. Who is he? Who was he? Who owns him? Who trained him? Secrets of state are at risk. As the truth about Pym gradually emerges, the reader joins Pym's pursuers to explore the unsettling life and motives of a man who fought the wars he inherited with the only weapons he knew, and so became a perfect spy.

A Perfect Spy 1987 BB

A Perfect Spy 1987 BBC Drama Series)

Episode 1: As a young boy Magnus Pym (played by twins, Jonathan and Nicholas Haley) sees his father Rick (Ray McAnally) imprisoned for embezzlement and his mother Dorothy (Caroline John) hospitalised by the stress. Magnus fakes a fit in order to escape the abusive uncle and alcoholic aunt with whom he has been sent to live. He is rescued from hospital by his recently released father who subsequently takes him along on the con of an elderly lady.

Magnus is sent to boarding school after his father is conscripted where staff and students disapprove of the flashy “business man”. Rick returns from the war a wealthy man and involves Magnus in a plan to defraud the bomb damage compensation fund. One night Magnus is hazed by a group of boys led by his “friend” Sefton Boyd and in revenge he tags the boy's initials on the wall of the staff toilet.

Episode 2: Magnus (Benedict Taylor) is called in to help his father after the plan to defraud the bomb damage compensation fund goes awry. Baroness Weber has asked Rick to help her recover a treasure trove secreted by her late husband before the war and Magnus is sent to accompany her. Upon arrival in Switzerland the Baroness runs up a large bill, absconds with all the money, and leaves Magnus down and out in Bern, in a classic example of the scam known as the Spanish Prisoner.

Magnus eventually manages to secure a scholarship to study law at the university in Bern. He befriends a Silesian émigré poet called Axel, who calls him "Sir Magnus". British intelligence officer Jack Brotherhood (Alan Howard) recruits Magnus to inform on a left-wing student group called the Cosmo Club. Magnus steals the club’s membership list and Axel is revealed to be a secret member. Jack persuades Magnus to betray his friend to the Swiss authorities

Episode 3: Magnus (Peter Egan) is called back from his studies at Oxford University to assist in his father’s election campaign. Peggy Wentworth (Frances Tomelty) whose late husband was conned by Rick approaches him. Magnus breaks into his father’s files and sends Rick’s prison records to Peggy. Confronted at a public meeting Rick brushes off his past misdoings as youthful indiscretions. Aware of his son’s betrayal he forgives him none-the-less. However, his hopes of political office are destroyed by the incident.

Magnus is recruited into the army and posted as an intelligence officer to Graz. Sabina his translator/mistress puts him in touch with a potential defector who turns out to be Axel. Axel hands over apparently important Soviet secret files on Magnus’s guarantee of anonymity, but later when under suspicion requires Magnus to hand over secret British files in return.

Episode 4: Rick crashes his son’s wedding to Belinda and offers them the gift of a new car, which is immediately impounded. Recruited by the Foreign Office, Magnus is sent to Prague where after making a pick-up from a dead-letter-drop he is arrested by Axel, blackmailed into exchanging further secrets, and reintroduced to Sabina who joins his network of planted agents.

Abandoned by his long neglected wife and reposted to Berlin, Magnus begins to court Jack’s girlfriend Mary. Late one night he is summoned to police headquarters where he discovers his father is being held in the cells for yet another bungled con job. Axel encourages Magnus into marrying Mary in the belief that the girl may help them gain access to their eventual target, the Americans.

Episode 5: Magnus is now married to Mary with a son called Tom and on his long awaited posting to Washington. He is still passing secrets but Axel is talking of retirement as things heat up. A committee of American agents headed by Harry Wexler and guided by Magnus’s “friend” Grant Laderer (Garrick Hagon) have noticed some curiosities in the computer analysis of Magnus and his Czechoslovakian networks.

Celebrating Christmas with his family, Magnus is called out to a bar where he meets his now destitute father. The committee comes to London to put their suspicions to senior British intelligence officers but Jack dismisses it all as a Czechoslovakian attempt to frame Magnus. Recalled to London and haunted by his past, Magnus, under a false name, takes secret lodgings with Miss Dubber (Peggy Ashcroft) in his old childhood neighbourhood in Devon.

Episode 6: While on a family holiday to Corfu, Tom (Graham McGrath) witnesses a meeting between his father and Axel. Axel tries to convince Magnus to retire or even defect but the double agent refuses. Jack recalls Magnus to Vienna where he learns of his father’s death. Magnus flies to London where he arranges the funeral and arranges for the collection of his father’s files. Mary calls Jack when Magnus fails to return to Vienna.

Magnus visits Sefton Boyd (Ian McNeice) and apologises for his first betrayal back at boarding school. Jack goes to Vienna in search of Magnus and interrogates Mary. Magnus retires to his secret lodgings in Devon where he enquires into local comings and goings. Jack searches Magnus’s home uncovering references to someone codenamed Poppy and begins to suspect Magnus of betrayal.

Episode 7: Jack continues to interrogate Mary to learn more of the mysterious Poppy. Kate admits to Jack that Magnus got her to remove references to Sabine from his personnel file. Recovering the doctored info Jack learns of Magnus’s mysterious contact in Graz. Axel passes a message to Mary offering his assistance in tracking the missing Magnus down.

Members of Magnus’s Czechoslovakian networks start to go silent. Jack realises Prague is rolling up the fake network and the extent of Magnus’s betrayal is finally revealed. With both sides now racing to find Magnus, Mary meets with Axel who gives her a clue as to where he is hiding. Jack and Mary drive to Devon where a police siege of Miss Dubber's lodging house ends with a single gunshot. Although the suicide occurs off-screen the final shot is of Magnus in the bathtub with half of his face blown away.

This was great! The fab episode descriptions are plucked from wiki. The earworm was Underneath The Arches

...more

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May 27, 2011 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: spy-thriller, 2020-aty-challenge, historical-fiction, cold-war

Magnus Pym is a perfect spy. He is groomed for it from birth by his wretched and criminal father, Rick. He has learned to lie, to pretend, and to betray, but he has never learned who he truly is. He is a man caught between worlds and putting on a different face for everyone he knows, so that his controller, his wife, his best friend, his father and even his son, all know a different man and none of them is the real man, the Pym who talks to himself when alone.

John le Carre is, IMHO, one of the b Magnus Pym is a perfect spy. He is groomed for it from birth by his wretched and criminal father, Rick. He has learned to lie, to pretend, and to betray, but he has never learned who he truly is. He is a man caught between worlds and putting on a different face for everyone he knows, so that his controller, his wife, his best friend, his father and even his son, all know a different man and none of them is the real man, the Pym who talks to himself when alone.

John le Carre is, IMHO, one of the best writers who ever took pen to hand. He never writes anything simple or easy. His books are as complex as his characters, as complex as the world of espionage itself, and they always reveal something of ourselves that we hate to look into the mirror and see but that we absolutely know is there.

Love is whatever you can still betray, he thought. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

Pym loves well and deeply, often in the wrong places, and Pym betrays everything and everyone, including himself. One of the characters refers to a spy as a “licensed criminal” and I believe that is one of the major points le Carre means to make. Just because a political entity endorses it, just because the law of man condones it, does not make it right. If an act is immoral, it is immoral. And, if a man has no moral compass, what does he have?

On the surface, this is a cold war spy tale, but this is not a surface book. This book is about people-- what makes them who they are, how they are shaped into their best or worst selves, how love and betrayal can rip a man’s soul, and perhaps how little chance one has against a deck that is stacked from birth or against a man who can charm your soul and then leave you as parched as a desert.

But at the last moment, I stopped to re-evaluate my view of Magnus Pym and discovered that perhaps, as a reader, I had also been betrayed. Perhaps he is never the man I thought or wanted him to be. Perhaps he doesn't deserve my pity or my understanding or even my heartfelt consideration. Perhaps I have been conned.

In my attempt to read or reread all of John Le Carre's novels, I am struck by how even he seems not to know how deeply the depths of a man can be plumbed. When you think "that is as far as introspection can go," he manages to delve just a little deeper. There is no multi-tasking when reading this novel, either...give it full concentration, or risk losing the thread completely. On the other hand, you get back what you give in spades. ...more

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Sep 09, 2019 Nigeyb rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I found 'A Perfect Spy' (1986) by John le Carré quite hard work for the two thirds of the book however I stuck with it and was really glad I did. In the final third it comes together beautifully.

I was also pleased I'd already read John le Carré: The Biography' by Adam Sisman, as 'A Perfect Spy' is very autobiographical and much of the plot concerns John le Carré's own upbringing, and in particular his appalling conman father Ronnie Cornwell who masqueraded as a successful entrepreneur making and ...more

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Dec 18, 2008 Nancy Oakes rated it it was amazing

I recently found a review of this book ( here ) that notes that A Perfect Spy is a kind of what-if autobiographical account of John LeCarre himself (fictionalized, obviously). Whether this is or is not the case, this is one of the best novels I've read this year.

Magnus Pym, intelligence agent for the British, has gone to London after the news of his father Rick's death. He is supposed to return to Vienna, where he and his wife Mary are currently stationed, but instead he sends his luggage on ho ...more

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Feb 26, 2020 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: great-britain, fiction

This isn't the type of book I would have normally bought or borrowed (although I did like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold read a few years ago) but it came to me as a birthday present last November from a relative who didn't have the foggiest idea as to my literary tastes. I would have felt guilty if I didn't at least try and read it, so, as not to interfere with my regular reading I pigeoned it in for the weekends only. It took a good hundred pages or so to truly get into it, and what I thoug ...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Thomas rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, 2012

Le Carre does Dickens...but he's not Dickens. There are two intertwined narratives in the book, one describing the main character's background and childhood (which, as has been noted, shares many details with the author's own childhood), the other describing his contemporary dilemma as a spy on the run. The contemporary man-hunt stuff is fun, thrilling, suspenseful; it would have made a good spy novel in itself with a little more development. The sections dealing with the character's childhood a ...more

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Feb 20, 2012 Wale rated it did not like it

I got through half-way in this book and had to drop it. What did it for me were the long narratives of flashbacks into the main character's past which I suppose were meant to unveil gradually to the reader who the main character really was and the ultimate motives behind his actions. They were quite murky and tedious and I didn't have the patience to really delve into them. I my opinion they detracted from the clarity and fluidity that should be salient traits of any good prose (from the Latin w ...more

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Jul 25, 2011 August rated it liked it

Philip Roth, himself, claims on the book's cover that it is "the best English novel since the war". I find that hard to believe, but I can understand why Roth would like it. It is structurally sound and Magnus Pym, the perfect spy, is a memorable character. Personally, though, I wasn't really impressed. It is a long book (700pages), jumping back and forth in time, lots of characters and a narrator who, somewhat schizophrenically, never refers to himself using the first-person singular pronoun. W ...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Fiona rated it it was amazing

Shelves: spy-fiction, favorites

The Sunday Times reviewer calls this 'a perfect work of fiction' and le Carre's masterpiece. I can't disagree. This is a fantastic read - a real page turner, intelligently written and often very funny. I'm a fan of JleC's anyway but I'm now in awe of his artistry and expertise in reeling in and hooking his readers. It's not often these days that I struggle to put a book down. My only regret is that I've finished it and will find it a hard act to follow for the depth of the main characters, for ...more

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Dec 10, 2012 Simon Mcleish rated it it was ok

Shelves: owned

Originally published on my blog here in August 2001.

One of le Carré's non-Smiley novels, A Perfect Spy is far more about the psychological pressures which create a secret agent than about the mechanics of spying itself. It is part of le Carré's move away from writing genre thrillers that really began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Magnus Pym is quite a senior operational officer, who has been running networks of British spies in Czechoslovakia for many years. After the death of his father Ric ...more

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Sep 12, 2009 Smiley rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I found this novel formidable. As far as I know, the author wrote it based on Kim Philby's life who later defected to the then USSR as a senior citizen there till his death. The title also reminds me of 'A Perfect Crime' I read in an anthology, a book I borrowed from the College of Education Library, BKK.

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Oct 25, 2017 AC rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: spy-mystery

Hmmm. Will have to think about this. Since I knew the ending and the book is long, an element of disaffection. Very rich in character, and in description... literature, not genre, to be sure (as Philip Roth had it).

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Jan 26, 2008 Tom rated it it was ok

A strange hybrid. The sections of the book concerning Pym's disappearance and the effect it has on his family and colleagues are good solid stuff. Unfortunately too much of the book is taken up with Pym's terribly over-written autobiography, that just goes on and on and on and on and on and on. Excruciating.

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Jul 24, 2011 Matthew Kresal rated it it was amazing

There are novels which can only be described by a single word: epic. John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, published originally in 1986, is one of those novels to be certain. It is a tale that stretches right across half the twentieth century in the form of the life of Magnus Pym, the perfect spy of the novel's title. The novel is also, in fine le Carre tradition, a fine cross between the spy thriller and a human drama and is all the better for it.

The story revolves around the life and times of Britis There are novels which can only be described by a single word: epic. John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, published originally in 1986, is one of those novels to be certain. It is a tale that stretches right across half the twentieth century in the form of the life of Magnus Pym, the perfect spy of the novel's title. The novel is also, in fine le Carre tradition, a fine cross between the spy thriller and a human drama and is all the better for it.

The story revolves around the life and times of British intelligence officer Magnus Pym from his childhood to then present day of the mid-late 1980's. As the novel reveals piece by piece Magnus's lie has been nothing but one large training ground for a future spy starting with his childhood under his conman father Ricky to years in Switzerland as a side effect of one of his father's scams that leads to him meeting his two mentors in the world of Cold War espionage right through to the then present dy. The picture that emerges is of a man forced to spend his entire life lying and betraying sometimes out of circumstance and other times just to survive with the consequence of him becoming "a perfect spy". Magnus is also a man who is ultimately always on the run from everyone including himself. All of this means that Pym is also quite possibly the best in the long tradition of le Carre's strong main characters.

A Perfect Spy also features some of le Carre's best supporting characters as well perhaps the best of which is Magnus' father Ricky who is based (by the author's own admission) on his own father. Ricky Pym is the man most responsible for his son's transformation into "a perfect spy" as a man who drifts in and out of his son's life with one con after another. Ricky is a man capable of great charisma and of being sentimental with those around him but never capable of really giving himself to any one person including Magnus himself. Much of the novel is spent as Magnus remembers his life with his father so that the theme of a son trying to figure out his relationship with his father and how it as affected his other relationships is as much a part of the novel as the spy thriller aspects are.

There are many other fine supporting characters as well of course. There is Axel and Jack Brotherhood as the two men who become mentors to a young Magnus is the game of Cold War espionage and who, as a result of their actions and attitudes, make fine literary contrasts to one another. There is Magnus's wife Mary who finds herself caught up in the world of her husband's creation and who, in the end, is trying to find her husband both physically and emotionally. There are Ricky Pym's partners in crime such as Syd Lemons who also drift in and out of Magnus's life as well or the group of CIA men who try to convince the British that Pym is not all that he seems. Each of these characters (and many others as well of course) makes for fine portraits of those who in some size, shape or form fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is the life of Magnus Pym.

For a jigsaw puzzle is exactly what Magnus Pym's life, and by consequence the novel itself, is. In chapters that virtually alternate across the 590 pages the novel switches between the present where Brotherhood and Mary search for Pym plus try to cope with what he has done and the past as Pym in letters to his son Tom (and in an oddly detached third person perspective as well) recounts his childhood and rise in British intelligence. The result is a blend of spy thriller (as the hunt for Pym intensifies along with proof of his double life) and the memoirs of a Pym who seems to fast be approaching the end of his road. In other words the present chapters are used to set up the puzzle of events that Pym is about to recount from his past. The sections where Pym recounts his past come across as much stream of consciousness as Pym seems to float from one aspect of his life to another in a not always chronological or even logical for that matter and (and least in the earliest parts chronologically) come from the author's own life as well. The result is a jigsaw puzzle that, with its lengthy chapters and at times stream of consciousness narrative, that requires the reader to pay quite a bit of attention and spend quite a bit of time on it as well (that is coming from someone who is generally a fast reader and just spent three plus months reading this). The result though is a rewarding work to read even if it is not for all tastes.

While the narrative style and page count might be off putting to some out there for others A Perfect Spy is a fine read and perhaps le Carre's best novel. From perhaps the strongest of le Carre's main characters in Magnus Pym to his fine cast of supporting characters (especially Ricky Pym) the novel is full of real flesh and blood human characters. It is also a fascinating trip down the history of the Cold War yet it is more then just that. It is also a trip down the jigsaw puzzle of what le Carre himself has called "the secret path": the path of the spy, the man who must lie and betray to survive. As much a human drama as a spy thriller A Perfect Spy isn't to be missed. ...more

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Feb 14, 2015 Laura rated it really liked it

Recommended to Laura by: Bettie

Shelves: espionage, audio-books, read-2017, british-literature, fiction-20th-century

From BBC Radio 4:
1/3. 'Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.' So says Magnus Pym, the spy of the title; and he has betrayed a lot in his life - countries, friends and lovers. When Magnus disappears after his father's funeral MI6 launches an urgent manhunt to prevent his defection. Dramatised by Robert Forrest.

2/3. When Magnus Pym disappears after his father's funeral MI6 launches an urgent manhunt to prevent his defection. But Pym is on a search of his own ...more

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Feb 25, 2009 Janet rated it it was amazing

The best John le Carre, the making of a perfect spy-- a boy who grows up with a conman father, who wants something to believe in, but also, has all the skills necessary. Brilliant beyond belief.

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Jul 26, 2016 C.A. Sole rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-john-le-carre

Like all his books, intriguing, sometimes complicated, but very well written and un-put-downable

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May 19, 2019 MTK rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A brilliant novel, though regular readers of le Carre should be warned that it is primarily a character study and only as an afterthought a spy thriller. The author has written many books about how the espionage community functioned during the Cold War, in this one he chose to focus on the inner workings of the minds of its members. The storytelling was a bit disjointed at times, but I think it was deliberate, as it suited the theme of the book and the rather disjointed personality of its protag ...more

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Apr 16, 2008 John rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2010

The first hundred or so pages of A Perfect Spy seem designed to disorient: after a charming opening where Magnus Pym descends upon a quiet English shore town for what appears to be some much-needed R&R ("Hello Mr. Canterbury," the woman greets him upon opening the door, catching the alert reader off guard and perhaps already sounding an alarm in the reader's mind), we cut to Vienna, where Pym's wife apparently doesn't know where her husband is, and over the pages that follow it becomes clear tha ...more

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Sep 21, 2018 Zuberino rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: espionage, autobiography, cold-war, childhood, fave-novels, spy-thriller, bildungsroman, fiction, cornwall, west-country

"Although I've never been to a shrink, writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway."

That John le Carre is, and always will be, considered a genre writer first and foremost, a mere peddler of spy fiction, seems to me one of the great travesties of modern literature (although there is some evidence that that assessment is changing). No one who has read A Perfect Spy could have any doubt as to his true genius as a novelist, as a master cartographer o "Although I've never been to a shrink, writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway."

That John le Carre is, and always will be, considered a genre writer first and foremost, a mere peddler of spy fiction, seems to me one of the great travesties of modern literature (although there is some evidence that that assessment is changing). No one who has read A Perfect Spy could have any doubt as to his true genius as a novelist, as a master cartographer of the human heart, in particular the heart that comes wrapped in a shell casing marked "middle-class English male". It is said that one need read no more than Updike's Rabbit quartet to understand the prototypical postwar white American male; likewise it seems to me that Le Carre's forensic dissection of his specific time and place and class through the medium of Magnus Pym is unlikely to be improved upon by any writer in the future.

This is largely because Magnus Pym, at a fundamental level, is Le Carre himself, a thinly disguised ventriloquist's dummy through which the writer chose, in his fifties, to finally release the howls and screams of a tormented upbringing, to display the ghastly stigmata left behind by his charming chameleon of a father and the English public school system. Between them, the con-man criminal Ronnie Cornwell and Sherborne School inflicted enough psychological damage upon the young David that half a century later, under the world-famous pseudonym of John le Carre, he was compelled to write an epic novel for his personal exorcism, a Bildungsroman that is all suffering and no salvation, a portrait of the artist to stand with the greatest of self-portraits. Even in a career marked by towering heights, A Perfect Spy must represent some kind of Everest. Magnus Pym for s Py? Quite likely. Le Carre's magnum opus? Most certainly.

It has all the strengths of his best fiction; a dense, discursive prose style that baffles right before it dazzles, an instinctive empathy with all his characters, even the briefest of walk-on parts, a comprehensive understanding of the mores and norms of prewar England and postwar Europe, an insider's knowledge of the absurd cloak-and-dagger of the Cold War, a total mastery of plot that repeatedly reminds one of an expert puppeteer. But A Perfect Spy also has that final magic ingredient - a lifetime of mute harrowing pain poured out on the page which, as it transmutes into high art, soars so far above the sordid limits of spy fiction as to leave the rest of the genre gasping like stranded fish, a giant among so many dwarves.

Suffice to say, Philip Roth was not far wrong when he called this "the best English novel since the war". There may be other candidates but A Perfect Spy is certainly in there with a very loud shout. There were times, especially reading Pym's bravura narration of his early life, from Cornish childhood via Sherborne to Oxford and Berne, that I simply did not want the pages to end because I could literally bathe in this luxuriance forever. There can be no greater compliment to a book. ...more

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Jul 28, 2018 Cathal Kenneally rated it really liked it · review of another edition

How could I read any James Bond books or even watch the movies? This is proper espionage. John LeCarre is a master storyteller, and although some of his books seem pithy, lengthy even they’re damn fine books to read. Not many are like him. He has no rivals

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Mar 23, 2014 Frank Stein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book is almost exactly what everyone says it is, one of the best novels to be written about duplicity and betrayal dressed up like a somewhat typical spy story. Like much work by le Carre, there are Soviets and Czechs and double and triple agents and jilted lovers and the usual panoply of genre characters, but weaving through the whole is a bildungsroman with a remarkable synchronicity to le Carre's (David Cornwell's) own life.

The main character is Magnus Pym, son of a notorious con artist
This book is almost exactly what everyone says it is, one of the best novels to be written about duplicity and betrayal dressed up like a somewhat typical spy story. Like much work by le Carre, there are Soviets and Czechs and double and triple agents and jilted lovers and the usual panoply of genre characters, but weaving through the whole is a bildungsroman with a remarkable synchronicity to le Carre's (David Cornwell's) own life.

The main character is Magnus Pym, son of a notorious con artist, Rick Pym, and the book traces Magnus's path from playing confidence tricks for cash to doing it for the sake of the "greater good," and describes the inevitable psychological devastation such coning wreaks on its perpetrator. This is all the more heartbreaking because Magnus follows Cornwell's real trajectory closely, from his time working with his dad to his time spying on Oxford college Communists for the MI5 to his time scouting out Soviet agents in Switzerland and Austria. The reader can tell the author's intimate and personal reaction to so many of these stories, and can almost see him emotionally working out his part in each of them as he writes. It is often touching and devastating.

Perhaps my only complaint is that by spending so much time in the mind of so many damaged men and women, so many deceivers and con artists, everyone in le Carre's world can come across as cravenly strategic. The connection running between all his characters is their desire to use other people as means instead of as ends, and so many people here are so focused on manipulation that they can appear to lack depth. They are always working out the angles. Yet this is what le Carre is getting at, after all, showing what this type of life does to people, and his cri de couer at the costs of this manipulation is heartfelt and real.

Perhaps almost as impressive as the exploration of deception is le Carre's majestic facility with the English language. At times it approaches Fitzgeraldian qualities of seeming effortlessness. This book is thus an amazing exploration of what spying means to people, inside or outside the world of professional spies. ...more

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Feb 11, 2008 Gerald rated it it was amazing

I should say, I just reread this book. As I do every so often with the brilliant novels of John Le Carre, aka David Cornwell, former British intelligence analyst and god-knows-what-he-can't-say. I reread them because, genre aside, he's such a masterful stylist of the English language.

The book's metaphors (shared with his other works) are also just right. The spy as "close observer" is the reader--as the very same. The spy as double-agent, as betrayer, is the inverter of love, the man in the mirr ...more

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About John le Carré

John le Carré

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John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), is an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré has resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owns a mile of cliff close to Land's End.

See also: John le Carré - Wikipedia ...more