Rating: 
Summary: VERY well crafted novel; can't recommend it highly enough
Review: The only reason I can possibly think of that other reviewers did not like this book is that it is too close to non-fiction for comfort and some just can't handle that fact. Having been a former spy himself, no one is better qualified than Le Carre to write about the deceit and treachery involved in the spy game business. And it follows that he would know very well not only how to craft his characters but some fairly authentic ones upon which to base them. The first chapter had me scratching my head wondering what was going on, but by ch 3 I was completely hooked. Forget the somewhat confusing and deceptive jacket cover and read this book for what it is: an insiders' look at the characters, both guilty and innocent, who manipulate (and are manipulated by) others. I read this lengthy book in 2 days - couldn't put it down. I had not read Le Carre before but certainly will again.
Rating: 
Summary: sensitive American's enter at your own risk
Review: This book's sole purpose appears to be a venue for Mr LeCarre to vent his anti-American anti-Bush and Blair feelings. In doing so, he creates the dynamic duo of Teddy and Sasha, lovable and sympathetic characters, but in today's real world they would probably be considered "losers". Their ideology is certainly no more noble than that which LeCarre finds so contemptuous in the Bush administration. And the ending was unbelievable - at best. Shame on Mr LeCarre for wasting his great talents and imposing his personal views on loyal fans. This reader would have loved a few hours respite from a subject so well-worn.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Friendless
Review: I keep buying le Carre's work to see if he will get back to writing in his own world i.e. cold war era politics and spycraft. He has been living in distrust of his own government for so long that he has forgotten who he is. John le Carre is (was) a great writer that specialized in character driven novels of thoughtful suspense and ideas that the reader could grasp and consider very close to reality.
In Absolute Friends he has failed in all respects. His characters, besides perhaps Mundy, are one dimensional and exist only to fuel his hatred of Western culture. The book is a slow page-turner (but I expect that from le Carre). You can read almost anything else of his to see that he can write when he wants to but this isn't it. His almost teary view of the demise of the Berlin wall made me ill but so did the rest of the book!
le Carre obviously pictures himself as a great political philosopher and thinker while we, the readers, are mindless sheep following our corrupt and cruel Western leaders without a thought. If we can't buy into the mindset that the great Satan is in reality a few major world corporations and their lackies, Western governments, then we are blind. Forget this book! I give it two stars only out of respect for his former work.
Rating:
Summary: Le Carre Recycled
Review: I won't rehash the plot in this review ... other reviewers have provided all those details. I will simply state that as someone who has read all the other Le Carre novels over the years, this one falls far short of his best work. Le Carre has been recycling his characters for years, and it's worked in the past because the themes have seemed fresh and interesting. Now, in Absolute Friends, those themes are tired and stale. There is the usual cast of characters: a woman who has been deeply hurt in the past and may (or may not) be saved by the hero's action or inaction; the old spymasters who run their "joes" but see clearly that the game they're playing is no longer worth the price; the cast-off spies that once darkened the shadows of the Cold War. And for the first 300 or so pages, you get a painful rebuilding of all these characters, and their histories, in long, slow, dull narrative. It becomes more of a parody of Le Carre than any real parody could be. In the end, what also destroys any interest the novel could have is Le Carre's openly-displayed anti-American and anti-war feelings. Le Carre has been a writer in search of a "bad guy" for years. The Cold War presented him with a fine palette of black and white, with his characters sometimes stumbling along the gray fringes where even the good fight sometimes left the good shaken and diminished. But Le Carre cannot come to grips with a world where evil comes in a variety of shapes and colors; where religion and culture and 1300 years of warfare are still playing their way across the stage. The lengthy diatribes in the mouths of his characters would be at home in some of the world's most repressive regimes - only his books would never be published there. But the best reason of all not to read this book has nothing to do with Le Carre's newfound distate for the West ... it has to do with something far more basic. He's written a boring book with recycled characters that goes on for almost 500 yawn-inducing pages. If you've read Le Carre in the past and enjoyed his work, avoid this one. Or, like me, you might find yourself wondering whether you'll ever bother reading him again.
Rating:
Summary: Selling a name not a story
Review: I was so relieved to see reviews that panned this book. I was concerned that I must have missed something when I read glowing reviews. This book meanders without any really compelling action and I felt at times Le Carre was parading out his knowledge of 60's politics rather than telling a story. The ending almost absolves the book as it is quite tense and has a bitter twist but it was a lot of work for ten good pages.
Rating:
Summary: An Absolute Must Read, Le Carré is Better than Ever
Review: ABSOLUTE FRIENDS opens in present-day Germany where Ted Mundy, a Pakistan-born son of a soldier who has recently lost everything in a failed English school, is working as a tour guide at the Linderhof, one of Mad King Ludwig's castles. He's living with a former Turkish prostitute, her son Mustafa and a dog. Then, like a phantom out of his past, Sasha appears on one of his tours. Sasha, Ted Mundys absolute friend. Then we flash back to Ted's past and learn that he's the son of an alcoholic British captain who stayed on after the independence of Pakistan. His mother died in childbirth and he when he gets older he resents having to go to England to go to school. He drops out of Oxford, travels to Germany wearing a Beatles haircut and winds up with a group of radicals. And it's here that he meets Sasha, who is diminutive in stature, but tall on charisma. Sasha is quick to identify Ted as a good soldier who can be trusted and during a protest that turns violent, Ted saves Sasha from a beating by carrying him over his head and taking the blows himself, which earns him both Sasha's undying friendship and an expulsion from the country, kicked out of Germany, but not out of Sasha's life. When Sasha next appears he is working as an East German spy, seeking his old friend's services as an operative in the West. Sasha wants to be a double agent and he wants to work with Ted. Mundy accepts and his life of spying causes him his marriage and alienates him from his son, but he is an idealist and plods on, until the Wall comes tumbling down and he and Sasha's services are no longer needed. But now after a decade Sasha is back in his life with a grand plan. This time the enemies are the corporations who control our economies, our governments and, increasingly, our minds. Or are they really the enemies Sasha is fighting? Is Ted's old friend still a revolutionary at heart, or has he thrown in with the terrorists? Ted Mundy is a man who has spent his life trying to do the right thing and in the end it cost him his family, his career and his country, everything, save for his principles and one absolute friendship, but maybe that's enough. Ted and Sasha are absolutely astounding characters in this absolutely astounding book, which at times I must admit, seems a vehicle for Mr. Le Carré to put forth his opinion on the current war in Iraq. He's against it, that's no secret, and it shouldn't be a secret that this book will upset some people on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, it's a cracking fine story that I believe everybody should read.
Rating: 
Summary: Over the Top
Review: What could have been one of his good novels was overpowered by this anti-American political screed. Those of us who follow Le Carre know his opinion of the US and the UK relative to the war in Iraq. He could have let us know about that in a preface or even a non-fiction work, yet he chose to beat us over the head repeatedly with his views and spoiled what could have been a good work. The "bad guys" are more a product of advanced paranoia than even a remote reality. Still, he's a helluva writer.
Rating:
Summary: Le Carré at his Absolute Best
Review: Ted Mundy seems a failure, owner of a defunct English language school in Heidelberg, on the run from his creditors. A bit of a comedian, kind of a loser who does English language tours of Linderhof Palace, one of the castles built by Mad King Ludwig in Bavaria, where he makes up history for the tourists and plies for tips with his Bowler hat. It's not what he does now that makes Mundy different from those around him, but his past. Born in Pakistan with his mother dying in childbirth, baby Ted was left to be raised by his father, a man who sought debt relief in a bottle. By the time Mundy entered his teens, his father had washed out of the service and Mundy goes to school in England where he falls in love with the German language. He moves to Berlin in the late '60s, lives in an illegal squat with a bunch of leftists and meets Sasha, short of height but a charismatic individual with the gift of gab. They become friends and his relationship with Sasha becomes the most important in his life. More important than that he'll have with his future wife and his son, more important than those he'll develop later when he works for British intelligence and more important than even that he develops later when he's back in Germany with his Turkish girlfriend Zara and her son Mustafa, whom he seemingly adores. Mundy, the loser, is one the run, living in Germany with Zara and Mustafa, when Sasha joins one of his castle tours. He presses a note into Mundy hand and thus it starts. Mundy believes Sasha is giving him a chance to redeem his life with a new and important undertaking. He goes to work for the wealthy and shadowy billionaire known as Dimitri who believes Bush and Blair went to war for reasons that have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and he sends Sasha and Mundy on a different and murky kind of mission. This time, the enemies are the corporations who control not only our economies, but our governments and, increasingly, our minds and in the end Mundy's belief in his absolute friend is going to be tested. Is his Sasha still a well-intentioned revolutionary, or has he sold out to the terrorists. ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is a spy novel, a heck of a story and a thriller. It's full of passion too and that will turn some readers away. Le Carré makes no bones about how he feels about the recent Iraqi invasion. He's a man not afraid to take chances. He has a point of view and he gets it out here and that takes away from the story a bit, but still, if you're a lover of spies and their trade craft. If you've enjoyed Le Carré through the years, you'll like this book. Jeremiah McCain
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful characters but a preposterous plot
Review: John Le Carre is one of my favorite authors and, with one caveat, did not disappoint me with "Absolute Friends." His characters and their development were characteristically well done. As he did with George Smiley and his wife, Lady Ann, Le Carre presents a believable - and sad - portrait of the collapse of the dysfunctional marriage of his protagonist, Ted Mundy, and his ambitious wife, Kate, who is a Labour member of Parliament. Ted Mundy was a double agent during the cold war and Le Carre's description of Mundy's difficulties in remembering which Ted Mundy was the British spy, which the spy for East Germany, and which the real Ted Mundy is brilliant. Unfortunately, though, Le Carre's well-publicized detestation of American and British policy in deciding to fight the Iraq War convinced him to use a toweringly preposterous plot device as the centerpiece of his book. Had he shown a little more restraint, "Absolute Friends" might have been a great book, not just a good one. Alas, he did not. Le Carre is a great writer but he should leave geopolitics to the grownups.
Rating:
Summary: Spies, Lies, Politics and Tragedy in John le Carré's Best
Review: Ted Mundy was born in India, in what later became Pakistan. His father was a British soldier who drank too much. His mother died in childbirth. Father and son return to England where Ted goes to school till he drops out of Oxford. He goes to Berlin, falls in with leftist anarchists and meets his absolute friend Sasha. He saves Sasha's life during a student demonstration and is beaten for his trouble, then whisked out of Germany by British diplomats. He eventually gets a job leading goodwill tours of British artists behind the Iron Curtain and he seems to be a happily married member of the British middle class. Then he gets in trouble because a bunch of clueless British drama students try to smuggle a Polish actor from Poland through East Germany and into the West. Sasha, now an agent of the East German secret police, steps in and saves Ted from the Stasi and now Ted is pulled into a double spy game in which both he and Sasha pretend to spy on England, when their real goal is to pull down the East German regime they both despise. They remain double agents throughout the Cold War, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ted is out of the spy game and they drift apart. They don't see each other often, but the bond between them is strong and apparently eternal. Ted divorces, drifts to Germany, gets a job as a tour guide in Germany, moves in with a Turkish prostitute, becomes sort of a surrogate father for her son Mustafa, gets a dog and appears to finally be happy. Than Sasha returns to his life. Pulling Ted into a scheme of founding an open university that will liberate Western thought from the corporate imperialists. This scheme is funded by a mysterious character named Dimitri, a renegade billionaire who denounces the recent invasion of Iraq by the Americans as "a criminal and moral conspiracy." He goes on to claim that the war has been, "dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty...launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-9/11 psychopathy. Yes, the book is a bit political, le Carré seems to feel that he has to get his views about Bush, Blair and the Iraqi War into popular print. Still it's a heck of a story with an fatalistic ending that reminded me of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." This is a character driven book, excellently written and it swept me away, but I suspect that if you are a strong supporter of the current administration in Washington, that your political views will cloud your judgement of this fine story which is, in my opinion, one of John le Carré's best. Reviewed by Captain Katie Osborne
| 
