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: Excellent, as (almost) always . . .
Review: I've been a Le Carre fan for several decades and I was a little concerned, back in the early '90s, that the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union would leave him nothing to write about. As has been obvious to everyone since then, I needn't have worried. Politics may change but people and their untrustworthy interrelationships don't. This time, though, there's a very specific, very contemporary focus to the events the author considers, from the radical student underground in West Germany in the '60s to the ill-considered U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- an event about which the author's own opinions are in no doubt whatever. Ted Mundy, expatriate Brit in occupied West Berlin in his youth, later recruited by Her Majesty's Secret Service to spy on the East Germans, is a professional liar, like many of the protagonists of Le Carre's recent novels. His closest friend, Sasha, is an "expatriate" East German, also in West Berlin, recruited by the Soviets to spy on the West -- but also, after he discovered just what his masters were capable of, a double agent for the British, through Mundy. But in all important ways, Sasha is a unflinching truth-teller, and that's his eventual downfall -- and Mundy's. As always, half the enjoyment of a Le Carre novel is in the convolutions of character development and in his unfailingly impressive use of the English language. In that sense, the plot almost doesn't matter. But as events roll on toward the present day, you can almost guess -- almost -- what Mundy's and Sasha's joint reaction will be, based on the way their lives have developed. Personally, I think Le Carre probably will never be able to duplicate the absolutely masterful Smiley series, but no book he's written has ever been less than excellent, and _Absolute Friends_ is proof of that.
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.
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: Involving Thriller with Arch Style
Review: I enjoyed this tale of intrigue, with the protagonist Ted Mundy, another Le Carre-loser with hard-to-nail-down motivation, understanding his role in a sham terrorist plot only at the novel's shoot-to-kill ending. Indeed, I rushed, fascinated, through "Absolute Friends" in just a few days, fast for me.
Nonetheless, this gripping story does have a weakness-Le Carre's arch prose style, which becomes a trifle grating. "Enter then Ted Mundy, hero of the Helstedt autobahn and the Steel Coffin. He is so scared of what these versions of himself get up to that it's like opening the bowling for the public schools' cricket team every time, multiplied by about a hundred." By the way: Did anyone else picture Ted Mundy as Basil Fawlty in John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers"?
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece, though a lesser work from the Master
Review: I can't say it's le Carre's best. It would have been a great book if it's written by a lessen writer, but coming from the one who wrote Tinker Tailor, one just can't help by expect more.
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.
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