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Loading... Absolute Friends (original 2003; edition 2004)by John Le Carre
Work InformationAbsolute Friends by John le Carré (2003)
   Best Spy Fiction (128) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) jklugman | Nov 13, 2024 |  This is an angry book. It was published in 2003, after the US/UK invasion of Iraq, something le Carré plainly did not support (who did, other than right-wingers, greedy industrialists and venal politicians?). The two friends of the title are Edward Mundy and Sasha (cannot remember if his surname is mentioned, it probably is). Mundy was born in Lahore just before it became part of Pakistan. His father was a disgraced officer in the Indian army, his mother was aristocracy but died in childbirth. After Partition, Mundy and his father returned to the UK, where Mundy attended public school, then Cambridge, then moved to Berlin and became caught up in the anarchist movement there. Which is where he met Sasha. Mundy was booted out of Berlin after being arrested at a demo. He joined the British Council, where he acted as escort and factotum for various UK artistic troupes touring East Europe, And so was consequently recruited by MI6. And also ran into Sasha, in East Berlin, where he was now a Stasi officer. Sasha recruits Mundy as a Stasi asset, but is really himself a MI6 asset using Mundy as the go-between. The Berlin Wall falls some time later and their careers come to an end. In the present day, Mundy is pulled out of “retirement” by Sasha, who wants to recruit him to a scheme run by a philanthropic oligarch (2024 readers will immediately be suspicious here, with good reason). Nothing, of course, is as it seems, and nothing ends well. Le Carré’s views on Bush and Blair are clear, even if neither is mentioned in the novel. The plot leaps about chronologically but is never confusing. If the book has a flaw, it’s that its story implies redemption but finally offers the opposite. It’s a good novel, well-written and impressively researched; and it’ll make you as angry as le Carré was when he wrote it. (  ) iansales | Aug 13, 2024 | There are few better authors at filling in the back story of characters in an espionage novel and Le Carré is in fine form with Bundy and Sacha. Bundy however is a man who seems to let things happen to him rather than chasing after them and so his work as a spy stretches credence a little. Perhaps this is why Absolute Friends is not very highly ranked in Le Carre's oeuvre. Le Carré's later novels also seem world weary and the intelligence services come in for much criticism, he has also become more and more anti-American and it is no surprise who are the villains in this book. Having said all this I found Absolute Friends superb entertainment and Le Carré's somewhat jaundiced view of the world's situation chimed particularly with the way that I feel. 4.5 stars (  ) baswood | Jun 16, 2024 | thisisstephenbetts | Nov 25, 2023 | zot79 | Aug 20, 2023 |
In this book John le Carré, the pro's pro, seems determined to resume his own apprenticeship as a writer, to shuck off the last stubborn vestiges of public-school cleverness. The rant at the end of the book is the proof. He does the most un-English thing imaginable: he loses his head while all about him are keeping theirs. Una nueva muestra del mejor le Carré, en forma de salvaje fábula sobre la hipocresía de la política, aunque no exenta de ternura, y a la vez un canto a la amistad que sobrevive en un mundo despersonalizado y sin rumbo. Con su habitual maestría, le Carré relata la historia de dos amigos a lo largo de cincuenta y seis años: Ted Mundy, hijo de un militar británico, y Sasha, hijo de un pastor luterano proveniente de la Alemania del Este. Ambos estudian en Berlín Oeste y se reencontrarán primero en la guerra fría y años más tarde en un mundo amenazado por el terrorismo y sojuzgado por la política americana de la guerra global.
Fiction.
Thriller.
Historical Fiction.
A ferocious new novel from the master: when a man's good heart is his worst enemy ... By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days, when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize. Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict. After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life-this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.48)
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