Rating: 
Summary: A major disappointment
Review: Over the years, I've eagerly sought out and read every one of Le Carre's novels. I looked forward to this one just as much, and in spite of some of the claims here, wasn't at all offended by any "anti-Americanism" in the book. Perhaps that's because I didn't really encounter any. Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the novel, I realized I didn't care. I didn't care about the plot. I didn't care about either of the major characters. I had absolutely no interest in who eventually did what (assuming someone finally got around to doing anything). Life is too short to read books just because the author used to get it right. I'm just glad it was a library copy and I hadn't sunk my own money into this.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolute Friends
Review: Le Carre's finest novel since "A Perfect Spy". Chillingly believable with the typical Le Carre "everyman" hero who has typified his work since the Smiley series of novels. The unlikely protagonist, Ted Mundy, and his alter ego, Sasha, are doomed from the first page, and even they seem to know it. As always, beautifully written and choreographed. One of the best anti-establishment, anti-war, anti- big corporate owned government novels written in the past 25 years. Right up there with 'Our Man in Havana", "The Quiet American", and "The Ugly American." Not for those who wrap themselves in the flag (whether the Stars and Stripes, or the Union Jack) and believe that might is always right.
Rating:
Summary: Le Carre's pre-emptive strike
Review: The book is classic Le Carre in its pace, style and characterisation. The book divides iteself naturally into three parts. The first part is set in the student Berlin of the 1960s. Two students, Ted Mundy, son of a British army officer and Sasha, son of an ex-Nazi Lutherian pastor and now a student leader, have a friendship forged in their mutual struggle against the capitalist society that surrounds them. As the son of a British Army officer who was introduced into Germany's radical student society of that time, I can affirm that Le Carre's depiction of the two Absolute Friends rings completely true. The central section of the book also rings of authenticity. The two friends meet again, Sasha as an East German bureaucrat and Mundy as a British Council official dealing with cultural exchanges to Eastern Europe. The ensuing extraction of Communist secrets to British Intelligence is classic Le Carre with all the usual trade craft, border crossings and moral ambivalence. The book was completed in June 2003 and Le Carre sets the third part of the novel in the period following the invasion of Iraq. Certainly all readers will recognise aspects of this new era we have entered. By this time one's sympathies for Mundy have been so engaged that one suspects it is all going to end badly. And so it does. A shadowy neo-Christian American organisation sets our heroes up as bad guys on the wrong side of the war on terrorism. Then, in an act of media theatre designed to bring Germany back into the Crusaders' fold, it slays them. Parts one and two are utterly believable. To the majority of American readers part three will not only be distasteful it will also most probably be unbelievable. However, the real tragedy for us all is that probably four fifths of non-American readership around the World would not find anything absurd about the ending. Le Carre is a sophisticated interpreter of the secret World. He is not in the business of writing stories he finds incredible. Perhaps he has moved from observer to activist and is hoping to preempt the sort of events he depicts here.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolute Friends/Abridged [ABRIDGED]
Review: Avoid!
Avoid!John Le Carre, abridged, even read by
Le Carre, is no good. A John Le Carre fan.
Rating: 
Summary: Provacative Spy Novel
Review: Le Carre brings readers one of his most provocative novels to date, when former British spy Ted Mundy spends his days conducting tours of one of Mad King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. With a flashback to his earlier days, Ted recalls meeting friend and fellow supporter of Communism, Sasha, in Berlin, a friendship never totally forgotten, when Mundy decided to join Sasha's spying efforts years later and create a double life from his British diplomatic service. But it is Sasha's present-day reappearance at Ludwig's castle that changes Ted's future, as Sasha introduces him to Dimitri who mysteriously wants to fund Ted's now defunct language school in Heidelberg to turn it into an unusual Counter University. Just who is Dimitri, what type of school is he interested in starting, and is Sasha a dupe, or is Ted Mundy the one to take the fall when a former CIA operative hones in? Author Le Carre draws the reader into Mundy's world of clashing ideals and cultures, from the deserts of Pakistan to the subversive politics of Berlin in the 1960's to present-day Germany, where no-one is exactly who they seem, even Mundy, who grapples with his own identity.
Rating:
Summary: Cold War relics boogie on
Review: One of the least likely candidates in recent fiction as a spy, Ted Mundy is past his political prime, has a job he enjoys, a cozy apartment and a Muslim girlfriend. His natural exuberance makes him a perfect tour guide. Out of the blue, Mundy sees a face from his socialist/anarchist past, an "old friend" from his dissident days in Germany, where he joined a group of political activists. This old friend has no place in Mundy's present. The expatriate son of a former British army officer stationed in India, Mundy drifts through his education and varied employment. He is a spy artifact, but once the Cold War sputters to an end, Mundy is at loose ends, moving from job to job, none of them his métier. He's given all to his other life. However, Mundy has enjoyed female conquests across the globe, a fringe benefit of his activism, so he isn't entirely without charm, although he certainly reads that way. In his current occupation, Mundy appears an unwitting buffoon. But then, what better ruse than the homely appeal of a foolish, prattling man? Mundy is a fragmented man, split into sections to accommodate his various lives: husband and father, part of the British work force and secret double agent. Eventually, Mundy's marriage dissolves and the disappearance of Communism all but annihilates the spy community. With the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the fire is extinguished. In Absolute Friends, Le Carre Lays out the craft of spying, the subtle psychological twists and turns, the fine-tuning, keeping the spy-in-training under control. Each spy undergoes a long period of reprocessing and mental restructuring, giving the extraordinary the appearance of the ordinary. Sasha, the socialist friend of Mundy's earlier days in Germany is the engineer of his introduction into the spy/counterspy culture. Mundy falls into the duplicitous role effortlessly; he takes direction well. In this most recent appearance, Sasha rages about the war in Iraq. One last great battle for the two old friends, one more jolt of action against injustice is proposed, a battle against "the enslavement of the global proletariat by corporate military alliances". The world of Absolute Friends is surreal, a tale within a tale, easily dismissed as Cold War paranoia. Except that much is known about the inbred spy subculture, the dark underside that began as a war against an unseen enemy and became, over time, a deadly serious game. Le Carre is conversant with this shadow-world, as it keeps reinventing itself to accommodate changing conditions. This novel is as changeable as the culture, as the game changes with the times, impossible to know which side is which. Luan Gaines/2004.
Rating:
Summary: Absolute Fundy Friends
Review: Teddy Mundy, old friend, is so absolutely believable you smell his sweater. But by design Sasha remains a vague and distant shadow. LeCarre means for Sasha to irritate readers so they marvel at the pearl of Teddy's lavish loyalty to a naïve ideologue. In the end though, Sasha is just another "cause," a foil for Teddy's compassion, another person in need of rescue--like Zara and Mustafaa and everyone else in Teddy's life. Teddy is, afterall, an adult child of an alcoholic caring for everyone to his own demise. So you are pulling hard for Teddy, absorbed in his every movement and thought and hope and his new wife and kid and in the end you don't see the cheap lefty sucker punch. And that's where the novel fails and crystallizes into political cant so ridiculous that one can only conclude LeCarr was in a hurry to get this one to press. When it turns out Sasha's crazy fascist conspiracies were correct all along you get an ending you suspect a 19 year-old Deaniac might have written.
Rating:
Summary: Vituperative hate piece
Review: If le Carre weren't at the end of his career, I would promise never to read another of his books. His Karla series was as good as I have read, but this anti American tirade is the most biased piece of junk I have seen. If you are the kind of easily sucked in instant believer in conspiracy theories, this is for you. To the other reviewer who said those not around in the 60's woulndn't understand, I say those not around in the 40's wouldn't see my point of view.
Rating:
Summary: The Man of Gray Turns Black and White
Review: Samuel Goldwyn famously chastised a screenwriter, "If I want to send a message, I'll use Western Union." That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with "Absolute Friends"--the novel is a message thinly disguised as a story, and not a good story, at that. I discovered Mr. le Carre a few years ago, and so count myself among his newer initiates. After I read a brief essay by Mr. LeCarre in The New Yorker, I picked up "The Constant Gardener", and was absolutely taken. Here, I thought, is a man who sees the world through his own eyes. Soon after, I read "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", the Smiley Trilogy, and "Little Drummer Girl". All were excellent. "Smiley's People" is one of the greatest novels I have read. Mr. le Carre's great strength in all of these novels was his ability to underscore all of the painful ambiguities of the world in which we live, of the perpetual struggle between societies and civilizations. To call these novels activist fiction, or "message books" would be crude and inaccurate; Mr. LeCarre tells a great story, first and foremost. His message has never been clear. That's the point. Mr. le Carre's world is colored with shades of gray. It is a world in which--all too often--the only way to defeat your enemy is to become, in some sense, worse than your enemy. The outcome may be desirable, but the means are disgusting. Granted, "The Constant Gardener" represented a bit of a departure, insofar as the book is a clever and subtle attack on globalization and its excesses. In this regard, "The Constant Gardener" falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that links "Absolute Friends" with the rest of Mr. Le Carre's works. It is not a political tract disguised as a novel, but it hints at some crystallization--or petrification--in Mr. le Carre's worldview, a diminution of the ambiguity of his earlier fiction. "Absolute Friends" features a compelling character--one can hardly imagine Mr. le Carre failing to creat a compelling central character--but, as a story, it fails in every other respect. The problem here is that, whereas le Carre's "message"--insofar as he has ever had one--has always emerged from the story, in "Absolute Friends" the story is contructed around the message. Mr. le Carre would have been better off writing a political tract, one to be placed on the shelf next to Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Paul krugman and other authors who share his views. The author's central failure is his inability to construct an adequate narrative to support the polemics in the book. The plot is pointless and transparent, a sort of after-school special designed to impart a clear and noticeably unambiguous view of the world: don't do drugs, don't talk to strangers, don't support Bush. As to Mr. le Carre's views themselves, "Absolute Friends left me with a heretofore unimaginable, and yet unmistakable impression: this is the work of a political naif, of someone who sees the world in the same simplistic terms that he finds so roundly disgusting in Mr. Bush. It is a view that will ring true with many around the world, but not one that provides useful insight into what is really happening, nor will it contribute meaningfully to the current discourse. Indeed, Mr. le Carre's stark and uncompromising views preclude discourse, and are devoid of the nuance and ingenuity that informed his prior works. Whereas the works of his earlier years provoked thought, inviting the reader into an internal conversation, "Absolute Friends" is a lecture, one side of a shouting match between a parent and his rebellious teenager, the hasty work of an angry old man. Mr. le Carre's best work is certainly behind him.
Rating:
Summary: One of His Best Post-Karla
Review: If your agenda is to justify the Iraq war, don't read this book. You will be tempted to write a hateful review. If you are too young to remember 1968 and are not interested, don't read this book; you will find the story too fanciful. For the rest of us, Ted and Sasha are real figures; there are millions of them. Like us, they lived on through the sobering reality, and felt betrayed by current events. The bitter ending is a powerful (perhaps unfitting) epitaph for the generation, delivered by the writer who possibly shares the pathos of 1968. Or perhaps, Le Carre's literary geneius knows too well how to connect. As such, "Absolute Friends" may not survive the test of time, but what does? The book surpasses "Secret Pilgrim" in its bitterness, and is far more compelling than his recent books including "Taylor of Panama" or "Constant Gardener."
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