A review by ajcousins
A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

4.0

John le Carre is a brilliant writer. And he sure is pissed off at post-Cold War Western governments. I am not unhappy with this: he is clearly a man who needs a reason to write and if he had been unable to find one after the Berlin Wall fell, then it would have been a tragic loss for Literature. But the heavy-handedness of his political opinions can occasionally go over the top, even for me, and I am someone who agrees with him. In A Most Wanted Man, happily, the heavy-handedness is almost entirely confined to the last page of the book. And if that last page had been written with the subtlety and grace that the rest of the novel possesses, then this would be a five-star review. It���s still excellent, because LeCarre is stellar at letting you feel that something terrible is looming over everyone, while you hope and hope that you are wrong this once and everything will work out. His characters are ambiguous and torn and very real, although they are (the main ones at least) most definitely not American, which may feel a little strange to some. This book of the complexities of the post-9/11 hunt for terrorists is a great read by a master writer.