Rating: 
Summary: Le Carre still has it!
Review: In the battle between those who can't seem to comprehend the elliptical style perfected by Le Carre (who give it one star in their reviews) and those who claim that Single & Single is a masterpiece (five stars), I come out on the positive side, but with a few reservations. Yes, the first 125 pages are slow. Yes, the writing can be maddeningly obtuse at times. And yes, none of the characters are complete models of moral integrity. But, if you expected something else from Le Carre, you've clearly not read his prior work. His books always take a while to draw you in. His lack of clarity in individual scenes are like brushstokes--eventually leading to a picture that (even though impressionistic) stands beautifully by itself. And Le Carre remains the superstar portrayer of moral ambiguity. In my view, Single & Single is completely consistent with Le Carre's other work. It's a very good addition to his body of work and delivers in the end. On the other hand, it's not among his very best (the Karla trilogy, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold), but it's certainly better than The Tailor of Panama (a book that had me believing that Le Carre may have lost his way). Welcome back, John, and please write a few more. It's so nice to see a thoughtful, literate, and entertaining book on the best seller list (even if it's only for a few weeks).
Rating:
Summary: He's back!
Review: Mr. David Cornwell(better known as John LeCarrè esquire) has come up with another very good book. Afetr the "disappointment" of "TheTailor of Panama", it seems he has returned back from farce and satire to what he knows best: characterisations, mysteries, moral messages and relationships. His great, philosophic, entertaining, complex writings have propelled him into the realms of Literature. And deservedly so indeed. He is not just a simple spy novelist, but a social philosopher and thinker and a great social historian, definetely one of the greatest of our life and times. A lawyer has his skull shot open on a Turkish hillside; A quiet, lonely magician in the town of Abbot's Quay is called in the middle of the night by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of 5,000,030 (the 30 has a very clever and symbolic sinificance) pounds into his baby daughter's very modest Bank account; An illegal freighter gets boarded by Russian coastguards with the brothher of an influential Georgian tradesman gets killed; The great merchant venturer Tiger Single disappears into thin air. What connection can these 4 events possibly have? This is what Mr.LeCarrè sets out to establish throughout the book. He also tells another tale, the relationship between a Father and his Son. The Son:The Traitor. The Father:The Betrayed. The roles get somewhat changed. The Son:The Redeemer and The Forgiven. The Father:The Saved and The Redeemed. LeCarrè being the great thinker that he is gives us a very realistic story based on his own relationship between himself and his father. Oliver Single, the Traitor(and also the children's magician) gets asked by a Customs officer to help him track down his father:The celebrated Tiger Single. We know exactly what will happen and how the book is going to end but the journey to the ending is masterful. Oliver's characerisation and his flashbacks connects all the events together and we see them all converging and leading to the final picture like a jigsaw puzzle.
LeCarrè has not lost his talent and ability to create characetrs and to create gripping mysteries ouw of nothing and leave us all satisfied yet hungry for his next. For those who have not met LeCarrè before, this is not the place to start, I recommend his earlier ones like "The Spy who came in from the Cold" or the Karla trilogy.
Rating: 
Summary: Could not be more disappointed
Review: I am a big fan of thrillers (Graham Greene, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth)--doubly so if they are well-done literary thrillers, so you can imagine my excitement when people recommended Le Carre to me as one of the great masters. So it was with great disappointment that I read Single & Single. The novel never rises above the conventional thriller: the predictable killings, the now mundane concept of the strained relationship between the protagonist and his father. Worse, and I admit that it might be just me, I found a lot of it ludicrous. Single detests his father and that lifestyle so much that he leaves it to become a clown and make animal balloons? Too bad that this was my first Le Carre novel (even my friends who are Le Carre fans told me that they didn't like this particular one). My friends tell me that I need to give one of his better novels, like Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy a chance instead.
Rating:
Summary: Typical Le Carre - and that means a good spy novel
Review: Although the Cold War has long since faded into the history books, John Le Carre is still turning out good, well-written spy stories. You cannot use the term "potboiler" with a Le Carre book, although some of his more recent endeavors have come dangerously close to that level. Thankfully, "Single & Single" is not one of them. Since the KGB doesn't exist anymore, Le Carre must look elsewhere for the kind of story he writes like nobody else. And he's found it in the story of Oliver Single, the son and junior partner of a banking house whose owner and senior partner is a greedy, corrupt, and probably amoral (business)man who has gotten in way over his head by getting involved in the drug trade with some - shall we say, less than reputable - gentlemen from the former Soviet Union. As with most Le Carre novels, the story moves back, forth, and sideways between various parts of and characters within the same story. You have to flip back a few times to keep track of who's who and what's what, but that was part of the charm of the George Smiley/Karla series, and it's the same here. Unfortunately this book does suffer from the one flaw that exists in most of Le Carre's books - and that's an uncanny ability to turn its so-called action sequences into the dullest parts of the story. I actually enjoyed the back-and-forth between the characters more than I enjoyed what they did. But if this "flaw" were corrected, I think I'd actually like Le Carre less than I do. Weird, isn't it?
Rating:
Summary: He's back!
Review: Mr. David Cornwell(better known as John LeCarrè esquire) has come up with another very good book. Afetr the "disappointment" of "TheTailor of Panama", it seems he has returned back from farce and satire to what he knows best: characterisations, mysteries, moral messages and relationships. His great, philosophic, entertaining, complex writings have propelled him into the realms of Literature. And deservedly so indeed. He is not just a simple spy novelist, but a social philosopher and thinker and a great social historian, definetely one of the greatest of our life and times. A lawyer has his skull shot open on a Turkish hillside; A quiet, lonely magician in the town of Abbot's Quay is called in the middle of the night by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of 5,000,030 (the 30 has a very clever and symbolic sinificance) pounds into his baby daughter's very modest Bank account; An illegal freighter gets boarded by Russian coastguards with the brothher of an influential Georgian tradesman gets killed; The great merchant venturer Tiger Single disappears into thin air. What connection can these 4 events possibly have? This is what Mr.LeCarrè sets out to establish throughout the book. He also tells another tale, the relationship between a Father and his Son. The Son:The Traitor. The Father:The Betrayed. The roles get somewhat changed. The Son:The Redeemer and The Forgiven. The Father:The Saved and The Redeemed. LeCarrè being the great thinker that he is gives us a very realistic story based on his own relationship between himself and his father. Oliver Single, the Traitor(and also the children's magician) gets asked by a Customs officer to help him track down his father:The celebrated Tiger Single. We know exactly what will happen and how the book is going to end but the journey to the ending is masterful. Oliver's characerisation and his flashbacks connects all the events together and we see them all converging and leading to the final picture like a jigsaw puzzle.
LeCarrè has not lost his talent and ability to create characetrs and to create gripping mysteries ouw of nothing and leave us all satisfied yet hungry for his next. For those who have not met LeCarrè before, this is not the place to start, I recommend his earlier ones like "The Spy who came in from the Cold" or the Karla trilogy.
Rating: 
Summary: So-so spy novel
Review: It had been a long time (over fifteen years) since I had last read a John LeCarre novel when I picked up this novel out of a bargain bin. Reading the story, I was reminded why I had gone so long without reading his books. Single and Single is not really a bad novel, but it is not a very exciting one either. The plot revolves around Oliver Single, son and partner of Tiger Single. Tiger is a wheeler and a dealer with a limited sense of ethics. Oliver's own ethics have caused him to betray his father to the law and go into hiding. When Tiger's life is threatened, however, Oliver re-emerges into society and searches for his father. For a story that deals with murder, betrayal and theft, there isn't all that much to excite. The characters are well-written but bland and the structure of the story is more complicated than it needs to be. I understand that LeCarre is supposed to be a master of the mundane spy story, but this is one tale that is a little too mundane and not masterful enough. For better works in the same field, I would recommend Len Deighton; once again, LeCarre has failed to impress me and it may be a long time again before I read another of his books.
Rating:
Summary: Le Carré makes the best of a post-Cold War world . . .
Review: Ten years ago, many of us were concerned that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union would also spell the end of Le Carré's masterful stories of international subterranean intrigue and mischief. We needn't have worried. We forgot that that there's just as much venality and disregard for law and civilization in the West as there ever was in the East. Le Carré's earlier work has reached its inevitable end, but the saga of George Smiley has been succeeded, if not replaced, by a series of individual tales featuring characters like (in this one) Nat Brock of the Customs Service, pursuer of the launderers of illicit offshore wealth in the hands of drug lords, arms dealers, and the Russian Mafia. The laundry being the House of Single, under the proprietorship of "Tiger" Single, who expects his surviving son and junior partner, Oliver, to someday succeed him. Oliver becomes closely acquainted with the Orlov brothers and their billion-dollar schemes, learns to fear the Georgians and their henchmen, and finds his view of the House of Single changing more than he would like. Being young and recently called to the law, he can take only so much before he peaches to the authorities in the person of Brock. And Brock, who can barely contain his glee, trains the young turncoat in undercover work and puts him back in his father's House as a mole. This is not quite what Oliver had in mind and, after causing his father considerable financial grief, he finally flees the whole scummy mess, preferring to hide out in a seaside resort as a children's party clown and magician. Then the Russians become more than Tiger, in his straitened circumstances, can successfully deal with, and Oliver is swept up in the acceleration of events. As always, Le Carré's characters are four-dimensional and utterly believeable. His narrative proceeds on several lines at once, in both the past and the present, which will keep you busy sorting out what has happened and guessing what is about to happen. This is his best work in several years.
Rating:
Summary: Great Vacation Read
Review: I read this while on vacation recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. This book is a good, light read that's great for vacations or other times when you want something that isn't going to consume all of your waking thoughts. Took me about five days to read. Single and Single isn't the super-intense spy thriller that I remember LeCarre's other books to be. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book -- just not as intense as some of his others. Recommend: Yes
Re-read: I probably won't bother re-reading this one.
Rating:
Summary: A new and different Le Carre
Review: Single and Single portrays the consequences for Oliver Single after his crisis of conscience. Single is a trust lawyer, with his father, for an emerging Russian Mafia family. The novel thrusts Single into a cloak and dagger world where he attempts to rescue his estranged father, and uncover the conspiracy within the conspiracy of the Russia underworld. The novel maintains tight suspense, and yet addresses issues of personal ethics and family relations. The book is really a great read, the only drawback is the lack of development among woman's characters. This weakness has little impact on the story or the message, and like some others of Le Carre's books the main character propels the story into a thought provoking struggle between ideas, as much as a struggle between people.
Rating:
Summary: Blood will tell
Review: Le Carre's writing talents didn't tumble with The Berlin Wall's rubble. Since the fading of the Cold War, he's demonstrated his continuing ability to weave a plot and image people apart from those in the espionage game. In this book, the Russians are still with us, but in a whole new light - they're active capitalists trying to make a ruble. Any way they can. Flogging "clean Caucasoid blood" to the West is merely an opening gambit, but it's a start. In support of this immaculate enterprise, the financial house of Single is recruited for money management. Tiger Single, the senior partner, with his son Oliver, are set to reap a fortune. Certain events impair the smooth flow of cash, and the Russian partners turn to a new means of profit-making, drugs. As a lawyer in a financial management organization, Oliver draws the line at drugs. It jeopardizes the future of the firm, and his own. He informs on his father to government officials in the hope of cutting a deal. Like many other Le Carre novels, this one eschews a simple linear plot format. You are offered a thread to study, then another seemingly unrelated, one. You must carry the information you're given when other threads emerge. But Le Carre never leaves you hanging or lost. The threads begin to come together in the rich tapestry Le Carre is so talented at weaving. Nothing is inevitable, the twists are sometimes abrupt, but never implausible. There are no real weaknesses in this plot. Some of the characterization, however, seems a bit contrived, unusual in Le Carre. Although not an espionage novel, Le Carre draws Oliver as if he was a George Smiley operative. He goes to ground with amazing skill for a lawyer, his cover the performance of children's magic shows. Oliver maintains this role long enough to marry, bear a daughter and complete a divorce. He is "run" by a Brock who teaches him tradecraft, which in Oliver's case only requires some touching up, not attending the whole course. Oliver is loved or admired by more women than one man deserves - his landlady, a Russian gangster's wife and Aggie, one the Brock's agents. Somehow, given Aggie's role, this last seems the least plausible. As with other post-Cold War Le Carre novels, this one is as much education as entertainment. You close the last page but you find closing down the memories and topics more difficult. International blood traffic is a real issue, exactly as pharmaceuticals were in The Constant Gardner. The issues are real, the people mostly convincing, the events hidden from the public eye, but revealing in their likelihood. Any Le Carre novel is worth a read, some welcoming a revisit. Single and Single is one worth picking up again.
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