Rating: 
Summary: The book not the message
Review: A book of strength and character. I fear that people are rating this book on blind patriotism rather than on the more important writing style and story. This book kept me engrossed, surprised me and enticed me into wanting more. What more could you ask? A great book to help one keep an open mind.
Rating: 
Summary: Your Resume Is Your Fate
Review: In the beginning of Absolute Friends, I found myself wondering why Mr. Le Carre had put together such an unusual resume for his main character, Ted Mundy. Be patient with those details because Mr. Le Carre uses every one of them to develop his most intricate plot ever. This book will continue to surprise you with its plot twists and will reward careful reading. Those who have a very cynical view of the motives behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003 will love this book.Brought up without a mother and with a distant father whose life was on the skids, Ted Mundy found himself looking for emotional connection. With a strong sympathy for the underdog and the oppressed, he finds himself some unusual friends among the radical community of his youth. Made of stern stuff, he willingly engages in helping them and becomes closely involved with antiauthoritarian Sasha in West Berlin. That unexpected connection becomes the central pivot of his life from then on. Try as he might to avoid it, he and Sasha are permanently linked through that youthful friendship. In essence, Ted Mundy's life becomes a resume that others are willing to interpret as supporting their views . . . and he finds himself unexpectedly draw into the espionage battles of the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mundy's past becomes valuable to those who want to create new perceptions today. In the process, Mundy finds his good intentions and friendship unintentionally subverted. The jacket copy for this book is misleading. It suggests that the story is mostly about the mysterious Dimitri, the idealistic billionaire who wants to recruit Ted Mundy. Except for a brief introduction, that section of the book comes only at the end. Most of the book deals with a flashback into Mundy's life before meeting Sasha and his involvement with Cold War spying. A lot of the action occurs behind the Iron Curtain, and pieces of the book will remind you of Mr. Le Carre's marvelous stories about espionage into East Germany. The book has an Achilles heel though in that Mr. Le Carre needs such an unusual combination of characters that the plot builds on what seemed to me to often be dense, unrealistic details. I kept wondering why he was making up such preposterous backgrounds for his characters. In the end, all became clear . . . but the story's eventual ending could have been told without all the background. The book feels like two books, loosely bound together by a limited tether three-quarters of the way through. Without the last section, this could have been a five-star Cold War book. With a simpler development of the last section, this could have been a four-star book about political chicanery. I found the way they were bound together was just too big a stretch for me. I found myself focusing on the author's plotting, rather than just accepting the story. I do, however, admire the mind that could put all these pieces together. If you are like me, the ending will leave you stunned and feeling queasy. Mr. Le Carre has a powerful message for us about the dangers of believing that everything is what we are told. Be skeptical! As I finished the book, I wondered again about the proper balance among our responsibility to ourselves, our loved ones and our loyalties to greater causes. Mr. Le Carre seems to suggest that we shouldn't be so idealistic . . . the price is too high. But isn't our idealism what makes us noble and admirable? Perhaps he means nothing more than that we shouldn't abandon all else for our idealism.
Rating: 
Summary: Anti-american nonsense
Review: This was a slow reading, boring book that one kept reading out of respect for the authors past offerings, hoping for it to come together, but it never does and ends in an almost science fiction anti-american conspiricy found in cheap "America is Bad" fiction. Almost James Bond in reverse. Don't waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: The reader can taste the world of spying
Review: Meet Edward Mundy, fiftyish tour guide for English visitors of King Ludwig's castle in Bavaria, and Zara, his Turkish girlfriend with a young son, who he has kindly rescued from a life of desperation and degradation. But Mundy is obviously disengaged from his job: he entertains, yet there is a distance and wariness about him. Mundy's stance becomes understandable when he merely senses the presence of Sasha, his "absolute" friend from the past and partner in radical politics and espionage, at one of his "performances" for the tourists. Yes, Sasha has brought a furtively delivered message for Teddy, but first Le Carre must devote the first three-fourths of the book to exploring the paths that Ted and Sasha have come down leading to this moment. Essentially, Mundy lived his early life as an outsider. His birth was the result of the ignominious relationship of his father, a major for the British army in India, with a servant girl. The crumbling of the British Empire in India punctured any remaining illusions of self-importance for the major. Back in England in public schools, Ted survives his casting as an "Untouchable" and even thrives via adopting a nonconformist approach to the school, his studies, and his selection of acquaintances. The Sasha phase of Ted's life begins with his arrival in Berlin after failing to complete his studies at Oxford. Ted leads a communal existence with like-minded radicals led by Sasha, a somewhat unappealing character with any number of skeletons in his closet. The group's petty activism inevitably brings a crackdown by the authorities and Ted is uprooted once more. He eventually finds himself working for the British Council, which involves foreign travel to support the British arts. At this point Ted becomes a successful double agent for England with Sasha as his East German interface. But the fall of the Wall and the governments of the East destroy the spy networks and Sasha is lost again. Fast forward to the present. Sasha has met a shadowy character Dimitri interested in reopening Ted's failed school of language for the purpose of reeducating the populace in superpower excesses, such as those surrounding the Iraqi invasion. It is at this point that the myriad of intelligence forces from the past converge in a somewhat perplexing final confrontation involving both Ted and Sasha. "Absolute Friends" is not best viewed as a book of action. Le Carre is more concerned with examining convenient illusions and deceptions, both perpetrated and self. Of course, espionage is the perfect vehicle for such an examination as it most certainly involves the art of promulgating and uncovering deceptions. Who best to participate in spying than those who have been forced to deal creatively with reality, as both Ted and Sasha most assuredly had through their years. As usual, Le Carre's use of language exquisitely captures the nuances of the British spy-world. The reader's ride in "Friends" is not without its bumps, however. There is some disjointedness in the scrambling of Ted and in his losing and regaining contact with Sasha. Perhaps the murkiness of their actions is an apt metaphor for the world of espionage. Some may find some excess in the author's obvious displeasure with real-world superpower power. Le Carre aficionados will undoubtedly be able to overlook the plot disconnects and enjoy the overall feel of the world of spying that the author captures so well.
Rating:
Summary: One of Le Carre's best books
Review: Le Carre's latest masterpiece spans three historical periods. The hero, Ted Mundy was born in Pakistan when the British Empire was crumbling, got a public school education in a changing England, went to Oxford and then on to Berlin where he met his fellow radical Shasha, forming an "absolute friendship". He and Shasha eventually formed a highly successfull spy pair during the Cold War, a period of ideological clarity as to what was right or wrong. After the fall of the Berlin war Ted finds himself a partner in a language school and, after this fails miserably, he works as a tour guide in one of Mad Ludwig's castles in Bavaria. Shasha reappears and they find themselves involved again, this time in a war-in-Iraq related operation. Only now things are not clear as to what is right or wrong. To quote Shasha "..the coalition has broken half the rules in the international law books, and intends by its continued occupation of Iraq to break the other half". Le Carre is [rightly so] highly critical of what the coalition is doing in Iraq, his thoughts full of the wisdom of a man whose life spans the same periods with the book's hero. This is not only a superb story of friendship, a historical novel, a well written spy thriller but also a cry of anguish of an educated citizen of the world caused by the post 9/11 state of world affairs.
Rating:
Summary: The end disappoints
Review: For the most part this book is classic Le Carre, he has created characters with depth, a plot that moves well, unexpected twists and an appreciation for locale and history. The book should have been a crowning achievement for him having decades of writing experience. Unfortunately the last two chapters disappoint. He falls prey to an 'inverse deus ex machina' and throws his otherwise well crafted story away. Unlike his vintage self - he gives in to an antagonist who is stereotypical and two dimensional. Could the master of intrigue be so gullible to fall for the popular Euro intellectual arrogance which claims that Americans - in particular religious Christians - are shallow and being hoodwinked by an evil administration? One would expect that Le Carre would offer unique insight into the Iraq conflict, not the magnified rants of the loud. You used to get the impression that he was giving you the real story behind the story. Instead we get the same old tired accusations which can't stand up to analysis. He of all people should know that the process of demonization begins with describing people in a dehumanizing way and making them seem to have no depth or perspective.
In any case, this book is worth the read for fans of Le Carre since the bulk of the book is well written and infused with his style.
For a better analysis look at the writings of Dr. Raymond Tanter who sees the Iraq War as a major strategic victory in the regional landscape and to some degree globally, and that the war was inevitable (regardless of politics). He sees state sponsored terrorism as the driver of much of the world's recent history with the solution being constraints on executive power as typically adopted by western nations.
Rating:
Summary: Puzzling
Review: I'm not going to rehash the plot, enough reviewers have done enough to remove most of the mystery from this book. I like John le Carre's work, I think of him as the thinking man's spy author. As usual, everything comes over so detailed, so realistic and so ultimately depressing. My puzzlement is about the finale. I think I understand what happened, who did it and why, but it just doesn't make any sense to me. If le Carre's somewhat hidden perpetrators wanted to make a big statement about, or against, people who opposed the Iraq war, I'm sure they could have made a much bigger statement, for far less money and much less byzantine plotting. They are so obviously in control of the spin doctors, that they hardly needed to set up such a complex plot just to kill a couple of has-been people nobody had ever heard of. Or am I missing something?
Rating:
Summary: "We meet, we fight a war, we separate for a decade"
Review: John LeCarre delivers a novel that is different from what we are used to, and although there are elements of espionage, the story centers on the personality, feelings and thoughts of the main character. Ted Mundy works as a guide at the Linderhof in Munich, after being betrayed by his partner in a previous business. The partner ran away with the money, leaving Ted broke and wandering through the streets, where he met a Turkish prostitute by the name of Zara. He helps Zara and her eleven-year-old son, Mustafa, and establishes a "family" with them. Both Zara and Ted are lost souls who find solace in each other, especially the latter when he realizes his problems are negligible compared to the ones the former has. These two characters generate a level of sympathy in the reader similar to the one awoken by some of the characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels. Just when things start going OK, Sasha shows up at the Linderhof with a proposition. At this stage we learn that these two characters are linked by their past and the author goes into a thorough description of Ted Mundy's origins as a spy, starting with his childhood in Pakistan, moving onto Ted's youth and ending at the present time with a former spy. Ted is a person that has associated himself with any cause he encountered, starting with anarchism joining his girlfriend Ilse in her quest and moving on to communism and later socialism. At each of these points, we observe a young man that is completely influenced by the people he befriends and admires, one of them being Sasha. LeCarre excels at presenting the human side of a character that will later become a spy "just by chance", evidencing that the espionage world is not only composed by cold calculating individuals, but there are some "normal" guys too. Once we grasp the motivations, conflicts and hopes of our main character, the author brings us back to the present and to the details of Sasha's proposal, which involves a mysterious man that goes by the name of Dimitri, and who presents Ted with a very tempting offer. I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by "Absolute Friends", since I was expecting a pure spy thriller, but found instead a well-developed novel, with three-dimensional characters and an engaging and thought provoking plot. This is a work that clearly evidences that LeCarre is at a stage in his career in which he does not hold anything back and is willing to speak his mind. He has the advantage that he can use his masterful prose to convey what he wants to express.
Rating:
Summary: Could spying be more boring?
Review: Absolute Friends is deadly dull, and the creaking, wooden prose does nothing to enliven in. This book is a 400 page version of Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy. Nevertheless, the book has some power, if only because it is painful to read about characters who mean well but are deceived and taken horrible advantage of. What le Carre has to say might have been better explained in an essay. Sasha, the chaos fantatic, opens his mouth and vast tracts of almost unreadable ideology unfurl for endless pages. No one human ever spoke in this way. I was struggling to finish this novel almost from the beginning--the childhood of the two characters' is barely convincing and far from riveting--and the book only begins to move in the last fifty pages, which is what poor books about spying, adventure, what have you, usually manage to do. I do not dislike this book for its politics. I wanted to read it to see what le Carre made of the current state of affairs, but there is nothing new in it. The conclusions (and the mood) are the same as those induced by reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. All in all, a dreadful book.
Rating:
Summary: LeCarré in good form
Review: John le Carré obviously doesn't favor the war in Iraq, but that shouldn't detract from, or add to, your enjoyment of this yarn. Le Carré is among the best at creating characters who get through life with no particular identity of their own, often owing to early estrangements of one sort or another. In this case, the victim is Teddy Mundy, son of a Pakistani army officer and an Irish domestic, an intelligent youngster who sees himself as having no particular ethnicity or country and no clear vocation. He falls in with revolutionary elements in Berlin and thereafter finds it easy and quite agreeable to be recruited by the British secret services and to operate under the identities that facilitate his work as a double agent in the battles of the cold war. It is a story in which no one is who he seems to be and therefore just the territory to which le Carré is a most entertaining tour guide.
| 
