The Night Manager

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: His Best To Date
Review: Let's face it. John's works (or should I say David's?)is not for everyone. Other reviewers suggested a pot of coffee to get through a chapter. Yes, if your particular area of interest in books lies with action-follow-action-follow-some-more-action-and-for-a-change-a-little-action, then JLC is not your writer. And if you're trying to get into JLC, for god's sake, don't start with The Perfect Spy. Almost made me quit. But Our Game, Night Manager, Russia House and Tailor of Panama are the top of his line and are to be enjoyed to the max...if you happen to like his slow but thorough character development. There is the old saying from Hitchcock that a movie is "life, with the boring parts cut out". John's art is in putting in the boring parts and making them sound interesting and the least bit exciting. I, for one, have fallen in love with Jed, got to know Dicky so well (can you see Roger Moore?), and leared to relate to Pine in so many ways, it's emberassing. I'm a writer myself, and if I maybe so bold, The Night Manager is my bible. Read it if you are taken aback by the fast-paced story lines of Clancy and his clones. Spying is waiting. Spying is taking in life, gruesome inch by gruesome inch, seeing characers rise and fall and be tossed half-dead into boats while evil sails on. Spying means that the only thing you will get after spending a day being a different version of yourself is love...and only maybe.

Oh, boy....see how JLC gets to you?

/Alec Corday

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.