Great boook, fascinating inside view of the military-industrial-political complex. Moderately difficult for me to understand as an American.
In an age of Edward Snowdon, shadow governments, whistle-blowers, informants, femicide, genocide, big pharma, war for profit, and crisis capitalism, the delicate truth, to which the title of the book also refers, has also been stated by the unlikely character Doug Wilson, from American cable television series, Weeds:
Take Doug's econo-political awakening, spin an elegant spy thriller around it, and I believe we have the gist of Mr. Le Carre's point, without giving away too much. Decorated with imaginative metaphors, draped in clever similes, stimulated through complicated plot lines -- it's well-executed storytelling with an ambiguous ending. It's about a British Foreign Intelligence Officer and involves murders, money, morality and conscience. It's a complicated story and a fun ride.What I thought was a game of finesse turns out to be one endless ass-to-mouth, human centipede of government and business that’s going to %@$! this country back to the stone age. My lips are chapped, my ass hole burns. You want to sell our corpse to Charlie Chan? Be my guest, I’m out of the game.
This story wasn't as gripping as The Tailor of Panama, or The Night Manager, or The Constant Gardner for one simple reason - I had a pretty hard time understanding it. Le Carre is a master at his peak, writing as he pleases - a writer of far greater literary and political sophistication than me.
I had to reread passages over and over again until I felt satisfied on the meaning. The British Le Carre spins English in an artful way quite foreign to the American ear and rhythm. I feel like a psychic linguistic detective, Googling Wikipedia for historical and polemic references, to get to the bottom of just what my hero, the writer Mr. The Sqaure, aka Le Carre, is saying.
That's alright, though. It's a fun challenge, which is thrilling, really. So difficult these days to find a solid book, darling. It's just that afterwards, my own fiction sounds so bloody English. Or is that Canadian?
