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A review by qu33nofbookz
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
2.0
This was a book club read and I dove into it without reading the blurb. That being so I thought that the main character Nat was much older than he was and that the time period was also decades ago not 2019 until almost halfway into the book.
The pacing was very slow and there wasn't much actually happening to keep you interested. It was a very dry read with little detail and a plot that wasn't really always clear as different scenes came and went. There is no "showing" of events in this book just "telling". This happened and then this happened and later this happened and then that happened and so on. The timeline was also not what I thought it was. I thought what was going on happened in a few short weeks but in reality, it was months, possibly closer to a year.
Last, the swearing...for half the book the story plods along and the dialogue is flat and pretty boring than all of a sudden the characters are dropping F-bombs all over the place with a few other swear words thrown in for good measure and it was rather jarring and didn't fit with the outline of the character as you had come to know them for half the book and it just doesn't sit well. It seemed rather gratuitous and unnecessary. If you planned to put it in start at the beginning and not in the middle when you have already established the characters in the reader's mind.
If you don't like political talk you won't like the back half of this book as well as it just drops off a cliff into a pit of hate and rage for almost no reason, and again it's completely out of character from the first half of the book. If you wanted the political bit, start it at the beginning not dropping it like a bomb from the blue halfway through, then just sprinkling it in a bolster a weak plot point the author has to try and justify to make the end work, which when all is said and done didn't really work all that well.
The pacing was very slow and there wasn't much actually happening to keep you interested. It was a very dry read with little detail and a plot that wasn't really always clear as different scenes came and went. There is no "showing" of events in this book just "telling". This happened and then this happened and later this happened and then that happened and so on. The timeline was also not what I thought it was. I thought what was going on happened in a few short weeks but in reality, it was months, possibly closer to a year.
Last, the swearing...for half the book the story plods along and the dialogue is flat and pretty boring than all of a sudden the characters are dropping F-bombs all over the place with a few other swear words thrown in for good measure and it was rather jarring and didn't fit with the outline of the character as you had come to know them for half the book and it just doesn't sit well. It seemed rather gratuitous and unnecessary. If you planned to put it in start at the beginning and not in the middle when you have already established the characters in the reader's mind.
If you don't like political talk you won't like the back half of this book as well as it just drops off a cliff into a pit of hate and rage for almost no reason, and again it's completely out of character from the first half of the book. If you wanted the political bit, start it at the beginning not dropping it like a bomb from the blue halfway through, then just sprinkling it in a bolster a weak plot point the author has to try and justify to make the end work, which when all is said and done didn't really work all that well.