Rating: 
Summary: This book [stinks}
Review: Someone has to say it, it might as well be me. I really hated this book. I started in on jury duty and almost gave up on it then in favor of 6 month old Highlights magazines. He introduced about 35 characters to us in the first 20 pages, I wasn't sure for the first half of the book if there were in Switzerland or Egypt, (I think that they had been in both), but I swear he couldn't make up his mind. I didn't like the characters that I was supposed to like and I don't want to spoil the ending, but the story never resolves itself. I really hated this book. I loves me some spy fiction, but this book blew chunks. I know that LeCarre is the master of the genere, but he was asleep at the wheel on this one. Heed my warning or suffer the consequences on your own. Dog of a book, man.
Rating:
Summary: This book [stinks}
Review: Someone has to say it, it might as well be me. I really hated this book. I started in on jury duty and almost gave up on it then in favor of 6 month old Highlights magazines. He introduced about 35 characters to us in the first 20 pages, I wasn't sure for the first half of the book if there were in Switzerland or Egypt, (I think that they had been in both), but I swear he couldn't make up his mind. I didn't like the characters that I was supposed to like and I don't want to spoil the ending, but the story never resolves itself. I really hated this book. I loves me some spy fiction, but this book blew chunks. I know that LeCarre is the master of the genere, but he was asleep at the wheel on this one. Heed my warning or suffer the consequences on your own. Dog of a book, man.
Rating: 
Summary: Suspense, passionate love, betrayal and just for starters
Review: The Night Manager could be Le Carre's best work. It is a gripping read, with layers and layers of gruff good guys and dashing bad guys. This post-cold war espionage thriller has more spying and intrigue than even most of the traditional works, but it is also a quite touching personal story about a man who essentially gave up living after a tremendous failure but is given a (quite costly) shot at redemption which he passionately embraces. It's hard to identify a "best" feature about this wonderful book, but one tense and fun side is Le Carre's exploration of how the espiocratic society, with no political enemies left, have become their own worst enemy.
Rating: 
Summary: Searching for the Post-Cold War Devil
Review: There is no question about LeCarre's writing. With The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, he sealed a place for himself as our preeminent espionage writer, if not as one of the 20th. century's great scribes. However, The Night Manager clearly misses a proper villain. Roper, the arms dealer funneling guns to every wrong-headed cause in both hemispheres, seems a bit too conjured. Still, it's no fault of LeCarre's; his superb tradecraft remains in fine form. The poor fellow simply lives in an age suffering from a terrible deficit of mystique. It is as if Mata Hari had dropped her last veil, revealing a rather common face.
Rating:
Summary: The Night Manager stalks the 'Heart of Darkness'
Review: This book is a departure from the usual espionage intrigue typical of Le Carre - there is no Cold War, East West undertones. This is a straight fight between good versus evil. Evil here is represented by the drug dealing arms trader Richard Onslow Roper. Good would be Jonathan Pine, the English night manager of a Zurich Hotel. But here it gets deliberately fuzzy and we have the shifting moral sands that make these characters come alive. Good could also include Roper for after all he is an Englishman and at face value would be included in what Pine calls 'Us'. "Us being Englishmen of self evident loyalty and discretion. Us being the Good Chaps" That's only at face value though, for Roper is evil and Pine volunteers to get evidence to bring him to Justice. It is in this pusuit that the moral sands shift again for Pine shows that he is himself quite capable of brutality and his vengeful unleashing of his malevolence on Ropers' forces hints at the darkness in him.This book and two other earlier novels ('A Perfect Spy' and 'The Honourable Schoolboy') where the titles so perfectly describe and define the central characters would make a nice trilogy of Le Carre's art of character development.
Rating:
Summary: The real thing
Review: This is eerily familiar to anyone who knows the businesses of private banking, international arms dealing and covert export licensing by governments. Originally recommended to me by a senior security source in an international bank, this was one of those rare and riveting occasions when a fictional account of a subject grew more and more recognisable on closer reading. A military intelligence researcher recently confirmed this view, telling me that "if this had been written as a textbook, Her Majesty's Government would have tried to ban it". For each fictional character there is a real counterpart out there; certainly for anyone who knows anything about the real post-Cold War agenda for western governments there is some jarringly accurate analysis of motive, mechanism and personality politics. Whether you read this as simply a thunderingly good story to rank with Le Carre's best, or as a "roman a clef" which reveals the real personalities behind British political administration, it is un-put-downable. (Fun game for parties of international bankers/arms dealers: How many real-world characters can you identify?) I now issue this as a textbook to employees embarking on careers in banking, as a morality tale about the perils of money laundering. Others should simply enjoy, and wonder how much is true!
Rating: 
Summary: Le Carre Revisits a Classic
Review: While not meaning this as an insult, it's helpful to know that _The Night Manager_ is essentially a rewrite of _The Spy Who Came In From The Cold_ -- except that the Berlin Wall is now an invisible wall made up of money, class, privilege and moral ambiguity. Johnny Pine is a man adrift -- a successful night-manager for exclusive hotels, he spends his time carefully forgetting his past in the SAS, and trying to forget how to feel. This is probably the most Greene-like of le Carre's novels; the action is driven by Pine's need for atonement for sins we know of and sins sins he barely hints at. It's richer, more complex and better-written than its forbear, but to some extent it lacks the melancholy ring of truth that made _Spy Who..._ so effective as an antidote to the romantic spy fiction of its day. Nevertheless, le Carre does a credible job of bringing his attention to bear on new areas of conflict. Well worth looking at.
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