Absolute Friends
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
'One of his most enthralling creations' Daily Telegraph Broke and working as a tour guide in Germany, rootless Englishman Ted Mundy catches a glimpse of an old friend hiding in the shadows. A friend he thought was lost to him. A friend who took him from radical 1960s Berlin to life as a double agent. Now, decades later, the Cold War is over and the war on terror has begun. Sasha has another mission for them both, but this time it is impossible to tell the difference between allies - and enemies. Set in a world of lies and shifting allegiances, Absolute Friends is a savage fable of our times. 'Thoroughly gripping' Sunday Times
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Meet Ted Mundy, son of an alcoholic Major in the British Indian Army, ex-public schoolboy, gangly misfit and chronic under-achiever. The perfect double agent. For that is what Mundy becomes in this strange novel by John Le Carré. (Now, if you are planning to read this novel, maybe stop before you read the rest of this review. It might colour your perceptions.)
Why strange? Because for three quarters of the book it is a superbly written tale of two men, the “Absolute Friends” of the title, who meet and are caught up it the radical Berlin of the 1960's, who forge a life-long friendship and end up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, both recruited as double agents by their respective secret services. And then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel takes a very strange detour into a long howl of rage against the way the Iraq war was conducted and the fabrication of terror situations to further a black agenda.
It's this last quarter that derails what up to then has been a perfectly entertaining espionage novel. Le Carré is great at the detail, the jeopardy and mundanity of the professional spy. Mundy, using The British Council as cover, both accepts and feeds intelligence to his friend, Sasha, now working for the East German secret police. The years of Cold War operations are Le Carré's stock-in-trade and this is the part that works best. But all this, it seems, is merely build-up so that Le Carré can vent his spleen at Blair and Bush. The last part of the story is full of cartoonish, barely believable characters and the two people you've cared about for 300 odd pages are treated, along with the reader, with contempt by the author. At least that's how I felt.
It's fine to be angry, especially at people as duplicitous as Blair and Bush, but this unfocused ranting spoils a good book. I expected better from such a great writer. Sadly this book leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Disappointing.
