Le Carre carefully weaves the various strands of the story into a pattern that gradually reveals itself over the course of the book. While the conclusion is painfully obvious to all -- except maybe Tommy and Annabelle who cling to the hope of the honest that others will stand by their words — the build-up to the inevitable is handled masterfully. Nobody can write the doublespeak, triple-speak, of the intelligence community like Le Carre, and A Most Wanted Man is another example of the master at work. We gasp in appalled disbelief as we hear scenes we've already witnessed mis-interpreted in order to suit the needs of an observer's agenda. People's lives are destroyed without their knowledge by the words of paid informants who repeat third-hand rumours as facts.
It's not the guilty who suffer in this brave new world of international co-operation in the war on terror, but those who have done nothing wrong. Le Carre makes our worst fears about the excesses of the intelligence community come to life without hyperbole or melodrama. There is something quite terrifying in how everything happens in so matter a fact a manner, and in the way that everyone takes it for granted that their actions are absolutely necessary, and that there is no other way to behave. The Turkish community in Germany may be one of the most established Islamic communities in Europe, but that doesn't prevent them from becoming guilty until proven innocent.
A Man Most Wanted goes on sale October 2nd, 2008 and can be purchased either directly from Penguin Canada or an online retailer like Amazon.ca.
Article comments
1 - Fred
As a long-time fan of Le Carré, "A Most Wanted Man" was a looked-forward to reading. In general it lived up to expectation, although Le Carré's cynicism is a little too obvious, and his "Intelligence" characters largely caricatures. One annoyance of the edition I read was that it was published in the US (a large print edition by Center Point) and translated, for some odd reason, into US English. No big deal, except that one of the British intelligence operatives has a business card with US spellings (an unlikely scenario from the very British Le Carré ).