Rating:  Summary: a denouement that only partially denoues Review: A middling good LeCarre read. He fails to serve up his quota of fascinating voluable oddballs and sleazebags. And the denouement leaves a lot of unexplained loose ends. Still, a good read and an informative look at the backside of today`s world..
Rating:  Summary: Le Carre In the Sunlight Review: A very un-Le Carre Le Carre, but a fascinating journey nonetheless. Our hero, a British ex-serviceman, is a night manager at a Swiss hotel when he comes across a roving gang of gun-runners. His brief acquaintance with the leader - an fellow Brit expatriate, venal but somehow likeable - leads British intelligence to recruit him to the Cause, and, through a series of carefully planned misadventures, he's adopted into the gang and shacks up at its private Caribbean base. Many observations on the politics of money laundering and the drug trade, particularly the ambivalence of the Cold War era agents towards cooperating with the DEA. Again, Le Carre's sense of atmosphere - particularly the stupefying torpor of the Bahamas - is tone perfect.
Rating:  Summary: Le Carre In the Sunlight Review: A very un-Le Carre Le Carre, but a fascinating journey nonetheless. Our hero, a British ex-serviceman, is a night manager at a Swiss hotel when he comes across a roving gang of gun-runners. His brief acquaintance with the leader - an fellow Brit expatriate, venal but somehow likeable - leads British intelligence to recruit him to the Cause, and, through a series of carefully planned misadventures, he's adopted into the gang and shacks up at its private Caribbean base. Many observations on the politics of money laundering and the drug trade, particularly the ambivalence of the Cold War era agents towards cooperating with the DEA. Again, Le Carre's sense of atmosphere - particularly the stupefying torpor of the Bahamas - is tone perfect.
Rating:  Summary: Worth a look Review: An earlier reviewer pretty much summed up this book for me - "...a middling good LeCarre read...". Not exactly his best but still a pretty gripping novel and remarkably undated, even post 9/11. Some of his usual themes about loyalty and betrayal are here but at least this book takes place in an England which I can recognize, not in some post-Empire never-never-land. In short, if you like your thrillers written by someone with more than a passing familiarity with style and the English language in general, don't be afraid to pick this up.
Rating:  Summary: a good read Review: as usual le carre delivers when it comes to explaining the motives of the characters it was also cool tosee people from the russia house and the secret pilgrim in the bookThis book goes over a common le carre theme of peopel doing evil acts for good outcomes.
Rating:  Summary: Sublime Review: Here is proof that LeCarre writes great literature, not merely bestsellers.
Rating:  Summary: Something is missing . . . Review: I am bond to read everything that Le Carre writes because he has so often in the past created fiction that satisfied both because of the beauty of the language and the pleasure of the story. Here, alas, while the language still has that complex, deliberately affected style that seems so appropriate to Britans of a certain class, the story has little to offer. One doesn't care about the characters and therefore one doesn't care what happens to them. Not much at that.
Rating:  Summary: Four attempts at Tape 1/Side 1 - No Joy!!! Review: I love audio books. They are great for travel and to liven up the daily commute. Perhaps the author shouldn't have tried to read the book himself. I have literally tried to get through the first side of the first tape, four different times. The subject matter, descriptions do not engage the imagination, and are hard to follow. My advice ...... let The Night Manager sleep it off till the morning......
Rating:  Summary: Bring back the Circus... Review: I was very disappointed with this book. The book started off with a bang and then sort of fell off into a rather lack luster ending. I long for the days of Smiley and the Circus
Rating:  Summary: Hurrah for the bad guys Review: JLC's engaging use of language kept me reading The Night Manager long after I'd tired of plot and theme that crumbled to nothingness as the pages turned. As an older woman, I clung to Sophie and her vanilla smells and the power attributed to her over Jonathan. The story was interesting for the bad tradecraft and the previous century nonsense with bugs, taps, and intercepted communication, so necessary to the plot, and circumvented in real life. So much could have been done with the "come to Jesus" elements or the raw Canadian inset. How could Pine/Thomas have been given a New Zealand identity with no backfill? Women sprinkled the tale and were morally abandonded by JLC, except for Jeds who was plucked Deus ex Machina to breed horses. Loved the Pamanian interlude, though not as satisfying as in Tailor of Panama. Were it not for some overstated sexual situations, the book would be suitable for analysis by high schoolers for its view of morality in the late twentieth century.
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