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Basically the story centers around a posh lecturer who meets a Russian mafia chieftain at a posh tennis resort in the Caribbean, and the Russian is so impressed by the lecturer's Hugh Grant act that he decides he wants to defect to Blighty because he likes the "English sense of fair play" (no, I'm not kidding.)
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There are only a few flashes of the old JLC brilliance in Traitor (some nice similes, a wonderful agent handler called Hector, and a sly attack on Harry Potter) but depressingly it looks like Le Carre's glory days of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People are far behind him. Reading JLC one is reminded of the Henry James critic who said that James was oddly obsessed by the tittle tattle and gossip at English tea parties while completely missing the rise of America on the other side of the Atlantic. Le Carre is still obsessed by Russian spies and Russian defectors while Russia slips down the great power rankings year after year so that now (in terms of GDP) it is at #10 in the world behind Canada. The rise of China of course has been the big story of the last decade but Le Carre has hardly noticed. In any case he has already done a Chinese novel, The Honourable Schoolboy, his worst book, set in Hong Kong (but actually still, drearily, all about Russia).
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President Obama picked this as the second of the two novels he took on his Hawaiian vacation. The other was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet which has everything this book doesn't: intrigue, drama, experimentation and a left field craziness that keeps you on your toes. Our Kind of Traitor, I'm sorry to say, is strictly for Le Carre completists and perhaps for people (you know who you are) who really enjoy long sweaty descriptions of tennis matches.
22 comments:
When I did art, i only painted one or two things well. I was better at the subjects i liked. I think thats the same for some authors. John Le Carre likes Russian spys. Why does he have to notice America or China? He likes Russia. Write what you know, is what you said. But i suppose you could try and know some new things and countrys. Maybe most people only have one or two classics in them anyway.
Frankie
Yeah I take your point, but its like getting that last scrape of peanut butter out of an already well scraped jar. At a certain point you're just fooling yourself, there is no peanut butter left; maybe you should try jam instead.
Ok, now I'm hungry.
this review carries a lovely backhander at the end, Adrian, not unlike Rosemary Neill's ripsnorter of Amy Chua's book (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) in the Oz this weekend.
Thanks!!!
If people tell you that you make great peanut butter sandwiches, maybe you stop making any other kind.
Try peanut butter sarnies with marmalade. The English version of Peanut butter and jelly. Its a winner.
I didn't read it, but the movie they did of Constant Gardener was quite good, I thought, and that was about Africa.
I haven't really read Le Carre, although I did for some perverse reason read the very end of the Spy Who Came in from the Cold when I was a child and my mom had it out of the library. I don't want to give anything away, but the effect may have been to put me off spy novels for all time.
I did read his early A Murder of Quality, which is more of a boarding school murder mystery, and really enjoyed his style.
He did behave rather badly about Rushdie though, when the fatwa was pronounced. I was just looking back to see if I had got this slightly wrong, as is my wont. Came across this great exchange between Le Carre, Hitchens and Rushdie.
I was just reading the other day over my friend Kathleen Kirk's blog that Sylvia Beach wrote in Shakespeare and Company
"Wars between writers blaze up frequently, but I have observed that they settle down eventually into smudges."
I somehow doubt that that proved to be the case here, but maybe I am wrong?
Gen
I read that.
Amy Chua, what can I say? Not a fan. More an enemy of the prose than the message.
Frankie
You're too young to remember Jim'll Fix It. But someone had Jim fix it so that they were served sausage and marmalade sandwiches at the Ritz.
Seana
It did not. Le Carre displayed amazing moral cowardice over the Rushdie incident.
It was a very strange reaction from someone who has made his place in the world through the life of the imagination and should have been defending it.
Seana
He's a very strange guy. Politically he's not far from those 9/11 Truther types.
Another reason not to get embroiled in too much about the spy world I suppose.
Diane Johnson, who I had always been a big fan of, really lost me with her last book, Lulu in Marrakech, and I've always wondered if I was just missing what she was trying to say. I wonder if she got too close to the CIA world of shadowy acts in her research or something and was convinced by it in some way.
I read the books when I was a kid, as well.
I recently watched the Smiley TV shows after being inspired by the Guardian's Top 50 TV shows of all time and it was great to see that they were just as good as I remembered.
Seana: That link was great.
"John le Carré's conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head"
That's the kind of line that first made me fall in love with Hitch
Yes, I thought so too. Writerly feuds are at least great entertainment for the readers of them. I think Le Carre was wrong as well about the Rushdie/Hitchens friendship not lasting. It was still going strong when Rushdie did his last book tour.
I think Le Carre has tried to leave the Russians behind; the problem is that he's not very good at it.
As exhibit A, I'll point at A Most Wanted Man, which was more about the US hunt for Muslim terrorists than anything else. Sadly, I was misled by all the reviews saying Le Carre was back in form, and I picked it up. I can only imagine that the reviewers stopped reading partway through -- it started out really well, and ended really badly.
So when I saw the latest set of reviews saying that Le Carre was back on form, I just stuck my fingers in my ears and said "Lalala". As far as I'm concerned, he stopped writing 20 years ago.
(But he really has tried to get away from the Cold War; I think it's not fair to not give him credit for trying. He did one about arms smugglers, and one about drug corporations, and so on).
Gav
Fair enough I stand corrected. Perhaps I shouldnt blame him for going back to the territory he knows best.
melvyn Bragg always said one of his biggest regrets was not pushing le Carre further in an interview in 1976
"I did the first big interview with John le Carré for the BBC in 1976. I did challenge him about being a spy and he said no and he was obviously lying through his teeth, as it turned out, but after I'd asked twice and he'd said no twice, what am I supposed to do? Say: "You're lying through your teeth"? We went on to other things"
I did like "The Constant Gardener" movie.
I haven't read books by Le Carre, although now I think I must read some of his earlier books, at least to see what all of the hullabaloo is about.
Wow--did that three-way argument ever get personal! Was it even about issues after awhile? Or about who was outdoing the other in personal insults?
I'd like to see a real intellectual discussion among the three of them, instead of a jousting match.
Adrian
I'm with you on LC. I'm roughhly the same age as you and watching Smiley and Tinker Tailor on BBC, got me into reading people like McClean, Jack Higgins then Seymour.
I think I read the books as a sixth former and I'm glad I waited.
Traitor, however, I simply found dull and stuck in a 7o's spy-formula cliche. I'd ordered from my local library, couldn't wait and then big disappointment. There are simply other writers doing that kind of stuff in a more contemporary way - Stella Rimmington and Henry Porter, for example.
I admit that I've always had LC on a bit of golden-age pedestal, probaly unfair. I went to see Stiff Little Fingers a few years ago - they can still play, a great night out, but it was pure nostalgia as they're still knockin' out the ghosts of top40 past.
I fear that for LC, it's maybe the same.
Nigel, County Down
Nigel
Yes, exactly. If Tinker Tailor hadnt been SO very good then you wouldnt have such a feeling of disappointment.
Overall I agree totally with McKinty's blog. I didn't buy the whole premise of a couple of petty bourgeios bending over backwards to save a murderous money-launderer. I didn't buy that Dima's bear hugs bluster warmed the cockles of Perry's heart to the point of risking his life for him. The main thing that kept me reading was the entertaining quality of the writing, which even then I found choppy, chatty, and pendantic at times. And the ending was a copout.
I thought OUR KIND OF TRAITOR had a great quality that kept the characters alive in my mind long after the last words. I keep thinking about who sent those guys, what about the family and would the private citizen "go to ground" as it were. What would I do?
I listen to audio books on my drive which lends to his style. And by the way some of y'all have forgotten that Mr. LaCarre is an author not an activist. Leave it at that. Besides by now those that read him should know that he can leave you frustrated. It's not escapiam with him- it's a glimpse into a disquieting world beneath.
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