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
Rating: 
Summary: Dude, where's my Le Carré?
Review: What oh what has happened to my favourite author, the creator of such Cold War literary gems as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "The Russia House"? Instead of the wonderfully complex humanist George Smiley, in "Absolute Friends" we are now presented with one-dimensional characters such as the hapless Ted Mundy and cartoon villain Jay Rourke. Rather than the tightly-woven plots of his earlier books, we now have rambling storylines that barely mesh. And in place of the morally ambiguous universe that made his earlier novels so compelling, we are now given the didactic dreck and leftist political clichés of Le Carré's newly-acquired weltanschauung. A deeply disappointing book.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning Disappointment - A Waste of Time
Review: You begin reading this book and hope it will get better...but it doesn't. It becomes so painful that you simply can't give up out of sheer hope it will improve. The only reason it is a page-turner is because you can't believe how bad it is. The story is extremely weak, the characters bland and stale, and the timing is horrific. Le Carre could have spared us all 350 pages of bland writing and wasteful detail, to instead write a short-story of this work. LeCarre had an opportunity to make a statement about many things related to terrorism: it's foundations in a person, events leading to becoming one, how countries deal with and seek to turn the tide. But he doesn't. LeCarre wastes all his time bouncing back and forth, all over the map with his characters, creating a void of any substance. "Absolute Friends" is an absolute waste of time. Do not bother.
Rating:
Summary: how have the mighty fallen
Review: Lecarre fall from the pantheon of great writers has been sudden and suprising. This book is unbelieveable boring. As you may know this novel is vehemently anti-war, but that is not its downfall. No matter hat his position on the war, that was not the reason for my poor rating. This book is weak, no character development and no excitement. It plods along like a snow monster in a blizzard. With 3 straight disappointments, maybe Lecarre should step aside for a newer generation of spy authors.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely a Terrifically Thrilling Story
Review: Ted Mundy was a mid level British spy during the Cold War years, never at the top of the game, always a servant who did his job. He was the kind of spy who never had a need to know. So when the Berlin Wall came down his services were no longer needed and he began wandering through job after job, till he finally winds up in Germany sans family, living with a Turkish mistress and her child and working as a comedic tour guide of German castles Then one day Sasha, friend from his leftist youth, shows up on one of his tours. Sasha introduces Munday to a mysterious moneyman ready to finance schemes to make a world terrified by terrorism a better place, if Mundy's ready to take a few chances once again and of course he is. Sasha, the best friend Munday has ever had, is a smooth talking, charismatic, failure of a revolutionary and from the beginning the pair are unwitting pawns in someone else's game. What that game is, and why they have been recruited for it is the question that will keep you glued to the book, weather or not you agree with Mr. Le Carré's politics. Mr. Le Carrés has few equals in espionage thrillers and once again with ABSOLUTE FRIENDS, he demonstrates why. Leeann Douglass
Rating:
Summary: Sad decline
Review: Le Carre has been my all-time favorite for decades, but he has completely lost it in his latest. A reasonably lucid prose style and sense of timing now falters. The characters are cardboard cliches. And the plot degenerates into conspiratorial nothingness. It's hard to believe this once-great author now expects us to follow the likes of Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and -- worse yet -- the Bader-Meinhof Gang of the Sixties. Avoid; buy any of his earlier works (even The Naive and Sentimental Lover) instead.
Rating: 
Summary: A Former Spy Myself, I Found This Book Generally Lacking
Review:
John Le Carre writes two kinds of books: truly riveting and gloriously accurate depictions of the spy world, and more labored pseudo-literature that over-reaches and disappoints. This book falls into the latter category.
As one who has both read much of what Le Carre has written, and also had the privilege of being a clandestine case officer (spy under official cover), I was initially taken with the concept of the book, despite its obvious intent to resurrect the genre in the aftermath of 9-11, but soon found myself bored beyond belief. It is closer to "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" side of Le Carre, than to the more deservedly riveting Tinker, Tailor, Drummer Girl, or Smiley's People, Looking Glass War side of Le Carre. There was a time, absent good non-fiction on the spy world, when Le Carre's work, his George Smiley work especially, not only delighted but informed. Now, with so many truly top-notch non-fiction books about intelligence (for instance, those by Milt Bearden, Robert Baer) one is really much better off reading non-fiction for fun. See my short and long lists of intelligence books (as well as emerging threats and blowback/dissent in foroeign affairs) for a sense of what non-fiction can deliver these days in the way of compelling and disturbing real-world spy reading.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: It's a wonderful book, really, informed by passion and anger, and more of the latter when all is said and done. Le Carre is a miracle, still seeking, still thinking, still leading with what sometimes feels like a broken heart. This is yet another gift from an authorial treasure. Enjoy.
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