The Night Manager

by John Le Carré

For the first time in six months, Jonathan felt the devastating, irrational impact of a woman he instantaneously desired.

‘Play golf, do we, sweetheart?’ he asks as Jonathan flits by. ‘No.’ ‘Me neither.’ I shoot the snipe with ease, Fischer-Dieskau is singing. I shoot the snipe with ease.

Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country’s many post-colonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolfchild with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel’s revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.

‘True hospitality gives to life what true cooking gives to eating,’

She talks lines, he recorded in his misery. Not words. Lines. She talks versions of who she thinks she ought to be.

‘Promise to build a chap a house, he won’t believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he’ll do what you tell him. Fact of life.’

Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.