A review by drewsof
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

4.0

The end of the Cold War really did a number on spying. The le Carréian basics were no longer in vogue, now suddenly it's multinational this and NGO that and really it could be forgiven, not being able to keep up. But I find it personally astonishing that le Carré manages to not only keep up but make the modern era feel of-a-kind with the sharper derring-do of his heyday. This is a novel about whistleblowing, about the War on Terror, about rogue capitalism. It does not land, now, with the weight of le Carré's best, but I think that's only because we don't have distance from it yet. Should we be lucky enough to get as far as we are now from the COLD/TAILOR days, I think we may look back on this, OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, and his late period work as just as vital to our cultural understanding of how the idiots who fucked up the world in the 60s/70s/80s continued to wreak havoc through the systems they built in the 90s/00s.