Single & Single

Rating:
Summary: Slow & Unsteady
Review: Calling this book a "thriller" is a bit like calling English cooking "cuisine" (or that "not a cheap shot"). Countless digressions and flashbacks prevent the story from building up much tension. The opening chapter serves as a good case in point: When threatened with execution, Alfie Winser's life literally passes in front of his eyes. This seems witty at first, until it begins (and continues) to happen to people whose lives are not in similar jeopardy. In the final 75 pages or so the pot finally begins to boil, but we're left with such a waterlogged mess that the climax lacks any real punch.

The story revolves around Oliver Single, one half of the book's title and junior partner of the story's eponymous capital investment firm. After experiencing ethical business qualms he leaves the firm, revealing its secrets to and British Intelligence and allowing them to set him up with a new identity. Of course, that never goes to plan, and coincident with his cover getting blown, Winser is killed and his father disappears. There's nothing left to do but for Oliver to become a junior G-man, find his dad, thwart the villains, and save the day. Sure, that's a pretty simplistic overview; on the way he has to fool around with three or four women, too.

If you enjoy psychoanalyzing things, you'll get a kick out of this book. Everybody has issues. Everybody's in denial. From the obligatory psychopathy and transgenerational child abandonment to exhibitionism and German-engineered phallic symbols, this book has it all. If, on the other hand, you like a tale of espionage, cat and mouse, cross and double-cross ... well, there's always the Smiley books.

In the end, Single & Single is a love story between a son and his father, so perhaps it's only natural that there be an Oedipal angle to the whole thing. If you go into it aware of what you're getting yourself into, perhaps you'll enjoy it more than I did. At any rate, the scene where Yevgeny Orlov asks Oliver to hop on his motorcycle ("Ride it, Post Boy! Ride it!" (p. 179)) takes on a whole new meaning when looked at from a Freudian point of view.

Rating:
Summary: Could not be more disappointed
Review: I am a big fan of thrillers (Graham Greene, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth)--doubly so if they are well-done literary thrillers, so you can imagine my excitement when people recommended Le Carre to me as one of the great masters. So it was with great disappointment that I read Single & Single. The novel never rises above the conventional thriller: the predictable killings, the now mundane concept of the strained relationship between the protagonist and his father. Worse, and I admit that it might be just me, I found a lot of it ludicrous. Single detests his father and that lifestyle so much that he leaves it to become a clown and make animal balloons? Too bad that this was my first Le Carre novel (even my friends who are Le Carre fans told me that they didn't like this particular one). My friends tell me that I need to give one of his better novels, like Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy a chance instead.

Rating:
Summary: He's back!
Review: Mr. David Cornwell(better known as John LeCarrè esquire) has come up with another very good book. Afetr the "disappointment" of "TheTailor of Panama", it seems he has returned back from farce and satire to what he knows best: characterisations, mysteries, moral messages and relationships. His great, philosophic, entertaining, complex writings have propelled him into the realms of Literature. And deservedly so indeed. He is not just a simple spy novelist, but a social philosopher and thinker and a great social historian, definetely one of the greatest of our life and times.

A lawyer has his skull shot open on a Turkish hillside; A quiet, lonely magician in the town of Abbot's Quay is called in the middle of the night by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of 5,000,030 (the 30 has a very clever and symbolic sinificance) pounds into his baby daughter's very modest Bank account; An illegal freighter gets boarded by Russian coastguards with the brothher of an influential Georgian tradesman gets killed; The great merchant venturer Tiger Single disappears into thin air. What connection can these 4 events possibly have? This is what Mr.LeCarrè sets out to establish throughout the book. He also tells another tale, the relationship between a Father and his Son. The Son:The Traitor. The Father:The Betrayed. The roles get somewhat changed. The Son:The Redeemer and The Forgiven. The Father:The Saved and The Redeemed. LeCarrè being the great thinker that he is gives us a very realistic story based on his own relationship between himself and his father. Oliver Single, the Traitor(and also the children's magician) gets asked by a Customs officer to help him track down his father:The celebrated Tiger Single. We know exactly what will happen and how the book is going to end but the journey to the ending is masterful. Oliver's characerisation and his flashbacks connects all the events together and we see them all converging and leading to the final picture like a jigsaw puzzle.

LeCarrè has not lost his talent and ability to create characetrs and to create gripping mysteries ouw of nothing and leave us all satisfied yet hungry for his next.

For those who have not met LeCarrè before, this is not the place to start, I recommend his earlier ones like "The Spy who came in from the Cold" or the Karla trilogy.