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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
a masterwork. dense and disorientating at the beginning, but i think le Carré intends it so. it's like he is throwing his readers into the deep end for the joy of it. then, like by magic, it all begins to make sense. brilliantly crafted characters right down to the bit players. no wonder this thing is 600+ pages long.
This is my second reading, seven years after the first. I was not nearly as charmed by this the second time around. This time I was annoyed by how fractured the storytelling was and wised it was told in a more straightforward sort of way. But I don’t regret spending the time. Three stars.
This is my second reading, seven years after the first. I was not nearly as charmed by this the second time around. This time I was annoyed by how fractured the storytelling was and wised it was told in a more straightforward sort of way. But I don’t regret spending the time. Three stars.
Desolate, but wonderful in an empty sort of way. Good themes here, well written and only gives you information through a character writing a narrative in a book about making up narratives. You can only betray what you love is a painful phrase that seems true. It reminds me of Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so be careful what we pretend to be.
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Easy to understand why this is widely regarded as one his best. Also feels largely autobiographical, which gives it a weighty, confessional feel amongst the usual intrigue and attention to tradecraft.
Re-read (or read for the first time, not sure) December 2022.
five stars but this was also a little baggy and shaggy in places. actually has very little to do with spying, apart from the general idea that spying functions for JLC like "sin" or "the flesh" does for Paul - a really useful extended metaphor for human frailty. this one is explicitly about the psychic wounds wrought by our connection to other people, by blood, affinity, imagined community, etc. this is probably overlong, and the big points are the same ones from the @dril tweet "blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin", but a total banger regardless. this one is according to JLC legend semi-autobiographical, so it concerns his wild grifter dad, and being a spy, and then the generation of erotically detailed overlapping and self-contradicting narratives of personhood.
TLDR: this is a confessional novel written by a double agent spy that is simultaneously addressed to his wife, his two rival minders, his son, with the narrative pretzeled around chronologically, with lots of dad issues, hypertrophic english manners, and western slav cold war vibes. like the third man on ketamine and also plugged into professor X's cerebro machine. (clear as mud). loved it, need a little break from JLC but gosh dang what a book. definitely contains like 40% male fragility by weight like those packaged meats injected with water, but male fragility is one of my love languages, so.
"Rick laughed his brown rich laugh, the one that went on longer than it need and made everything all right again until next time"
"Memory is a great temptress, Tom"
"His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude"
"Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann's genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations--hold this knob and let my energy revive you"
"'Harry, with the greatest possible respect,' Mountjoy of the Cabinet office piped with very little respect at all..."
"looked as though he had been hauled from Langley by his hair"
"unlovable even to myself"
"Why befriend a bunch of grimy and unhappy people of alien background and mentality, press himself upon them ... merely in order to be able to betray them?"
"looks like a mouse peering out of a red bear's backside"
"marching them through town like prisoners" (Rick's special guests)
"The frosted air smells of cow dung and the sea"
"his wife opens garden fetes with her teeth" (i have no idea what this means but it sounds like a sick insult)
"Democracy is when you share your father with the world"
"in the beginning was the deed. Not the motive, least of all the word"
"As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfocussed sense of God's approaching retribution"
"Why won't she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud"
oldest, most broken down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children" goddamn what a scene
"[told a story] full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune"
"it's like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall"
"The responsibilities that weighed upon me, I will admit, blew me across the borders of what Justice, in her blind wisdom, deemed right. Justice exacted her penalty. I paid it in full measure. As I shall pay for it all my life." (The sequences around Rick running for Parliament and the widow Wentworth telling Pym about Rick's crimes is just jaw-dropping)
"He tried to remember who it was in mythology who cursed to live long enough to witness the consequences of his bad advice"
"Can't lose what you haven't got. Can't miss what you don't care about. Can't sell what isn't yours."
"hard-edged courtesy"
The sequence when Pym and Axel are realizing that both are spies - and Pym "need[s] suddenly to tend his outward appearance" - Pym performing his spyness, his Pymness
"There is only Pym and Axel and disaster in the world. He is changing into an old man even while he listens. The ignorance of ages is descdening on him."
"Life is duty, he reflected. It's just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you."
"As Pym walked the momentous night away under a canopy of unreachable ideals..."
"Membury continued swimming at his own good pace..."
"There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough."
"In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best"
"He wanted anything but the marvellous horizons that led to lives he had not lived. He wanted to spy on hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise"
"Hullo old son. How's the world using you?"
"Do I need to tell you, Tom, how bright and dear the world looks when we know our days are numbered?"
"Rick had homed in on every one of them, weeping and shrinking before my very eyes, until all that was left of Rick was what he owned of Pym; and all that was left of Pym, it seemed to me, as I wove my lies and blandished, and perjured myself before one kangaroo court after another, was a failing con man tottering on the last legs of his crediblity"
"Betrayal is a repetitious trade"
"He had been taught from early in his life that untidiness was the sister of insecurity"
"And England was being saved from things it didn't know were threatening it"
“Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.”
also relevant to my ongoing irregular catalog of old janky cars appearing in genre fiction:
the cops who look into Lippsie's death drive Wolseleys
TLDR: this is a confessional novel written by a double agent spy that is simultaneously addressed to his wife, his two rival minders, his son, with the narrative pretzeled around chronologically, with lots of dad issues, hypertrophic english manners, and western slav cold war vibes. like the third man on ketamine and also plugged into professor X's cerebro machine. (clear as mud). loved it, need a little break from JLC but gosh dang what a book. definitely contains like 40% male fragility by weight like those packaged meats injected with water, but male fragility is one of my love languages, so.
"Rick laughed his brown rich laugh, the one that went on longer than it need and made everything all right again until next time"
"Memory is a great temptress, Tom"
"His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude"
"Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann's genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations--hold this knob and let my energy revive you"
"'Harry, with the greatest possible respect,' Mountjoy of the Cabinet office piped with very little respect at all..."
"looked as though he had been hauled from Langley by his hair"
"unlovable even to myself"
"Why befriend a bunch of grimy and unhappy people of alien background and mentality, press himself upon them ... merely in order to be able to betray them?"
"looks like a mouse peering out of a red bear's backside"
"marching them through town like prisoners" (Rick's special guests)
"The frosted air smells of cow dung and the sea"
"his wife opens garden fetes with her teeth" (i have no idea what this means but it sounds like a sick insult)
"Democracy is when you share your father with the world"
"in the beginning was the deed. Not the motive, least of all the word"
"As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfocussed sense of God's approaching retribution"
"Why won't she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud"
oldest, most broken down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children" goddamn what a scene
"[told a story] full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune"
"it's like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall"
"The responsibilities that weighed upon me, I will admit, blew me across the borders of what Justice, in her blind wisdom, deemed right. Justice exacted her penalty. I paid it in full measure. As I shall pay for it all my life." (The sequences around Rick running for Parliament and the widow Wentworth telling Pym about Rick's crimes is just jaw-dropping)
"He tried to remember who it was in mythology who cursed to live long enough to witness the consequences of his bad advice"
"Can't lose what you haven't got. Can't miss what you don't care about. Can't sell what isn't yours."
"hard-edged courtesy"
The sequence when Pym and Axel are realizing that both are spies - and Pym "need[s] suddenly to tend his outward appearance" - Pym performing his spyness, his Pymness
"There is only Pym and Axel and disaster in the world. He is changing into an old man even while he listens. The ignorance of ages is descdening on him."
"Life is duty, he reflected. It's just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you."
"As Pym walked the momentous night away under a canopy of unreachable ideals..."
"Membury continued swimming at his own good pace..."
"There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough."
"In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best"
"He wanted anything but the marvellous horizons that led to lives he had not lived. He wanted to spy on hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise"
"Hullo old son. How's the world using you?"
"Do I need to tell you, Tom, how bright and dear the world looks when we know our days are numbered?"
"Rick had homed in on every one of them, weeping and shrinking before my very eyes, until all that was left of Rick was what he owned of Pym; and all that was left of Pym, it seemed to me, as I wove my lies and blandished, and perjured myself before one kangaroo court after another, was a failing con man tottering on the last legs of his crediblity"
"Betrayal is a repetitious trade"
"He had been taught from early in his life that untidiness was the sister of insecurity"
"And England was being saved from things it didn't know were threatening it"
“Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.”
also relevant to my ongoing irregular catalog of old janky cars appearing in genre fiction:
the cops who look into Lippsie's death drive Wolseleys
I listened to the version of this that was produced as an audio play, rather than a full-cast reading. It took me a while to adjust to it. I’d like to read the full version to compare. While there’s less spycraft in this one and more relationships, it’s engaging and well-written.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Le Carré is a perfect spy novelist. He understands that there are no good guys or bad guys in geopoliticsust, just unstoppable leviathans and the people who are crushed beneath them.
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes