rickwren 's review for:

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

5.0

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Well Crafted. That's a phrase that's overused. We should save those phrases for the best of the craft. We should only use the phrase, well-crafted, for a novel with pieces assembled like a 90,000 piece puzzle, without a single piece missing and none leftover when the board is complete. We should only use that phrase for this novel, this crafted masterpiece of suspense.

I wondered why people like Le Carre. Now I know.

I was Magnus Pym and I didn't know him. Magnus's father weaved in and out of the book like threads in a tapestry, yet he was the most important piece - a con man who was pure of motive who couldn't teach Magnus right and wrong because there isn't any such thing.

I learned more about love and sex and lust from this book than I learned from my first three girlfriends. I learned more about what it means to be human from a flawed double agent than from a thousand hours of Sunday School.

The language was hypnotic. The dialect encompassed me and the careful word choice fooled me.

The twists frightened me more than a roller coaster. The turns took my breath away.

I am now in awe. I know what he's capable of, and I hope someway, somehow, he repeats it.