Absolute Friends

I hesitate to express my reaction because I think it would - in my case - give away too much of the conclusion; I don't want to spoil it for other readers. Suffice to say: I enjoyed reading it, found it somewhat suspenseful - not on-the-edge-of-my-seat suspenseful but enough to wonder where is this going?

Okay, le Carre's last book, The Constant Gardener, was marred by too much anti-capitalist pontificating, and the ending of this one declares its post 9/11 ideological leanings in a very blunt way, but don't dismiss le Carre as a crank: Absolute Friends is a first rate novel by a first rate writer working near the top of his form.

In this book le Carre fuses two of his main preoccupations: the inner lives of spies and the patched-together moral systems of men living on the crumbling fringes of the British Empire. Ted Mundy is the son of a disgraced soldier mustered out of the British Army in Pakistan. Ted's father takes him back to England where he endures the rainy, inhospitable life of a down-at-the-heels English schoolboy. His love of the German language and its literature carries him to Berlin during the sixties, where he falls in with a left-leaning tribe of radicals and anarchists. It's here that he meets his lifelong friend, Sasha, the renegade son of a German Lutheran pastor.

Sasha, both street-smart and hopelessly romantic, jumps over the wall to East Germany, where he becomes as disillusioned with ham-fisted socialism as he had been with exploitative capitalism. Ted, now back in Britain, shepherding art groups on tours through Iron Curtain countries, meets his old friend again in East Berlin. Sasha, under the guise of recruiting Mundy as a German spy, becomes in turn a double agent for the Brits. This is familiar turf for le Carre, and he mines it for his usual insightful explorations of individual identity. Ted has to deal with who he is, both in the existential moments of deception, and during the dead times when it's just him and the left-over bits of personality that he's kept out of the day-to-day masquerades.

The crumbling of the Soviet Empire puts an abrupt end to Ted and Sasha's spy careers. Ted is rewarded with a language school in Germany that eventually takes a financial nosedive. Sasha wanders in the wilderness as an itinerant radical lecturer until he meets Dmitri, a man with a murky past and a messianic vision for the modern west. Sasha finds Ted and enlists him in yet another scheme to redeem the world from error. What happens next is what might occur if America were run by a dogmatic, not- very-bright leader who happened to be fronting for people opportunistic enough to use the threat of terrorist attacks as a means of consolidating their power.

Sasha and Ted are immensely sympathetic characters who have compassion in abundance, a sense of history, and a belief in the world's inter-connectedness. What makes them different from Smiley and le Carre's other spies is that they're only intermittently propped up by their sense of historical imperative; otherwise they're forced to improvise, and it's this combustible mix of idealism and improvisation that leads to tragedy.

Le Carre burns with moral outrage, but he doesn't let his beliefs outrun his literary judgment. The pacing here is masterful, the prose precise, and the characters nuanced in their feelings and reactions. At a historical moment when the very idea of nuance is under attack, we need more writers who have the drive and talent to make us ask what it means to be a socially responsible human in this particular time. Such writers are a necessary counterweight to those politicians who use current events to ram home their political agendas.

This novel was a real pleasant surprise for me. I'd read one or two le Carre novels quite some time ago, and I had some vaguely pleasant memory of them, but I'm certain I enjoyed this book a great deal more than I had any other le Carre stuff I've read.

First of all, it's topical. It's wonderful to see that the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of interesting espionage tales. Though it was published 3 (4?) years ago, it's still very relevant to what's going on Iraq, perhaps even moreso now than on its publication date.

That's not to say that it's all about America and Iraq, really only the climax during the last 150 pages or so is directly involved with that issue. The backstory of how these two men met, befriended each other, and became involved working on both sides of the Berlin wall occupies the bulk of the novel. Mr le Carre is many things but he is not direct; IMO that's an admirable attribute and it's a pleasure to weave through the narrative until we arrive where we know we're going: these men become spies, and they become involved with British intelligence.

A few times I scratched my head and wondered "where is he going with this?" In a novel that one expects to be formulaic and in which certain things are taken for granted from page 1 it's a joy to be confused about where the author is taking me. And maybe I'm a dullard, but I didn't see the end coming until about the same time as the two central characters, to their detriment but to my delight. Who doesn't enjoy a surprise ending?

And though the politics of the novel may seem a bit paranoid, it's a shame to have to say that in this day and age...they may not be so paranoid, after all. And at the very least the reader is left with a few things to go over in his or her mind after the story's through. What more can one ask of a novel?

Pick this one up.

A richly observed story of Mundy, a man coming into political awareness in radical late 60s Berlin but never coming to terms with who he really is. Except that he is best friends with Sasha. Yeah, it's a buddy novel and what guy isn't a sucker for one of those?

The Mundy character is a suberb fictional creation, absolutely right on. Well, except till the last chapters. Alas, that final section didn't ring true. The Mundy that Le Carre had created for me should've smelled the rat quicker and bailed. That Mundy would've rescued fragile Sasha from the brutal state, the way he had on the streets of Berlin in '68.

As for the politics, what struck me is how poorly put together is the alternative to the U.S. hyper-power. There's no counter-ideology, for example, just a collection of musty old "60s classics" like Frantz Fanon. So the opposition to Le Carre's accurately described near-naked U.S. imperialism (neoconservative evangelism is at best a jock strap) is an embarrassing parody, French snobbery it's only solid pillar. The world needs something much better.

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.

Absolute Friends follows follows two friends, Sasha, a German, and Mundy, a Briton, from their radical student days in West Berlin to the present day when they are asked to participate in a murky, internationalist, pacificist scheme. During the cold war, both have worked heroically as double agents at great personal cost and it is in these sections of the book that we se the traditinal LeCarre' at his best.
The plight of the discarded, post cold-war spy is also done well. Mundy has ended up a near-pauper in Germany, leading English- speaking tourists on tours of historic sights, when Sasha recruits him to meet a mysterious, didactic billionaire who wishes to start a anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist university. Mundy agrees to be a front for the effort and finds himself again facing his compatriots from his spying days.
To tell more would be to spoil the story. But a warning - it's confusing and not very convincing, given LeCarre's usual skills. Here I think he's too caught up in conspiracy theories that truly test one's disbelief.

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?

The long friendship between Mundy & Sasha is John LeCarre's vehicle for exposing the often toxic complicity between the British & American secret services from the late 20th to early 21st century. The central characters' intense political consciousness makes for some long-winded diatribes, as well as some touching connections & poignant scenes of good people trying to lead ordinary lives. A deeply (& justifiably) angry book.

Strong friendships in the spy business are allegedly rare and even deemed impossible to maintain. Who can you trust? What is truth? On which side is the other? Who is the enemy, yesterday, today and tomorrow? In this latest endeavor to explore the spy thriller genre beyond the cold war, Le Carre explores these and other questions. First of all, this is the story of two unlikely friends: one English, with a strong colonial background, the other German, with an East German background. They first meet in Berlin during the late 60s student rebellion. From then on they get drawn together by circumstance or design over years and decades after, until ...

The story's centre is Ted Mundy, an unidentified narrator follows him and seems to view the world more or less from the same perspective. Mundy's on and off reflections of his increasingly complicated life expose him as an accidental spy. He feels like he's having multiple personalities. Drawn by a sense of responsibility toward his student friend, he gets enmeshed deeper and deeper in political intrigues even long after the Berlin Wall comes down. Why does he continue despite the alternative of a fresh start and a small piece of personal happiness? Does he have a real choice?

Sasha, his friend and German counterpart, incorporates traits of young German rebels of the day. He also typifies a certain type of former East German refugee in the West who is torn between dream and reality: anti-west as well as anti-east. The question keeps arising whether he has any real moral standing or is a floater, a prime candidate for the double agent. Several other players who stand out in their respective roles surround the two main characters. There are several attractive women, of course, and English and American spymasters. While all are a bit shady, the "honest" spymaster remains, not surprisingly, the Brit.

Le Carre knows how to draw people and create situations. His description of life in a student commune in Berlin of the time is brilliant in its accuracy and atmospheric depiction. Ted's childhood in India, then Pakistan, is conveyed through images that explain its influence on him, his ongoing nostalgia for the place and the people. A major strength of the book is these images and the characterization of Mundy as a result of all his experiences. Being familiar with the events of the time, especially in Berlin, I was captured by the story. For me Absolute Friends is more than a spy thriller - the core thriller only starts more than halfway through the story. While the first half is a build up of the two main characters for the later events, it also sets the stage for the ongoing exploration of friendships and the complexities of human relations. The final drama of the book has led to criticism of Le Carre. However, while unlikely in reality, within the context of the story it was a logical conclusion.

Absolute Friends has attracted friends and foes. Those interested in the European scene up to and beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall will find the story especially interesting. Those looking for the traditional spy thriller may be disappointed in the length it dedicates to the characters and their interactions. [Friederike Knabe]

After World War II, the Japanese needed an enemy, but didn't want to offend their neighbors and new feudal master any more than they already had. So naturally they made films with giant dinosaurs wading in from the sea to stomp on Tokyo.

I feel that John LeCarre has created a bit of a monster in this book. (Mild spoiler alert.) Like a great painter who can't draw the hind legs of cows, he has never been able to portray Americans very well, and has never, even, gotten within a thousand miles of the inside of the American conversative mind. But he keeps trying, anyway. He apparently knows that for Europeans, and for a lot of Americans, "neo-cons" are a towering monster, a scary, if almost entirely fictitious, projection of their own subconscious. But can a serious writer end a serious spy book with a monster invading Heidelberg?

No, apparently he cannot. While much of the early writing in this book reflected Lecarre's earlier successes -- his characterizations are still good, his desciption of place and back histories, pathos and irony, make the first 80% of the book quite enjoyable for me -- the apocalypse is so ridiculous I felt a bit embarrassed for the writer. I was afraid he was actually trying to make some sort of serious point -- given the frequency with which these Ameri-con monsters show up in his stories.

John, come to my house some time, and I'll introduce you to a few real monsters. Next time, perhaps they will come to seem a tad more -- well, this is supposed to be a spy novel, right? -- more human.

As I read this book I anticipated the outcry from those readers who believe all is well with pax Americana, which would be reflected, no doubt, in scathing reviews of Mr. le Carre's effort. Since I happen to agree with his criticisms of America's foreign policy that so clearly serves what can best be described as economic imperialism, I find no reason to object to this work on those grounds. I'm not offended, therefore, that Mr. le Carre uses his considerable skills as a writer of fiction, to argue a political point of view that seems important for him to make at this time in his illustrious career. I doubt one could call it a summing up because we will likely be treated to more excellent fiction from him in the future. Yet as a man in his early seventies, I can imagine his work focusing more directly on matters of significance to him. Clearly he is concerned about the complicity of his government with America in pursuing policies that create division rather than build consensus.
As I read this marvelous book I felt I was revisiting the world of George Smiley where agents moved back and forth across the Berlin Wall to exchange cold war secrets. In the manner of his best work, Mr. le Carre has given us a fully realized character, whose search for affiliation and sense of loyalty create unending hardship for him. Once again, the author explores the relationship between father and son, a father not unlike his own. The son, eternally in the shadow of his more flamboyant and dissolute father, is forever trying to fit in but often without much success. He becomes a dupe easily manipulated by others. But he also is a good hearted person who does his best to make amends. Friendship is at the heart of this book, and despite the fact the main character is flawed, it is easy to care about him.
I appreciate that consumers of Bush's jingoism will find little to appreciate in this book. Those not so inclined who appreciate a well crafted story will be well satisfied by Mr. le Carre's efforts in this book. Enjoy!

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is perhaps John le Carré's most elegant construct in some time. By its conclusion, it also reflects the author's anger against America's and Britain's overt justification for their current involvement in Iraq, i.e. as the front line in the war against Muslim terrorism. I doubt if it will be preferred bedtime reading for George Dubya or Tony Blair, just as CONSTANT GARDENER wouldn't find favor with pharmaceutical company CEOs.

The hero of the story, and its ultimate patsy, is Edward "Ted" Mundy, born in Lahore of a British officer in the Indian Army and a native nursemaid to an aristocratic English family on the very night that the Raj formally splintered into India and Pakistan. Ted's mother dies during childbirth. His father, the "Major", subsequently joins the new Pakistani Army, but is eventually sent back to England in disgrace after striking a brother officer. Over the decades, the younger Mundy plays cricket, drops out of Oxford, becomes a Berlin anarchist, is expelled from West Germany, and becomes a minor functionary in the British government and an MI-6/Stasi double agent. Then, after German reunification, Ted fails as an English language teacher in Heidelberg, becomes a tour guide at one of Mad King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria, and meets his final destiny as an apparent Muslim sympathizer who's fallen in love with a Turkish ex-prostitute. Mundy's largely directionless life is characterized by a lack of entrenched commitment to anything political, and, like a leaf, is blown from cause to cause by girlfriends, wife, mistress, intelligence handler, circumstance, and, above all, his "absolute friend" Sasha, a stateless, radical visionary/philosopher/anarchist, whom Ted originally meets during his youthful anti-establishment period in West Berlin.

As with any le Carré offering, all of which compulsively stress character and plot development, the reader seeking action and thrills need not open the cover. To my mind, the author's greatest triumphs were the two George Smiley novels, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY and SMILEY'S PEOPLE, both of which were made into superb television miniseries by the BBC and starring Alec Guinness in the title role. Here, Mundy, in his own way, is as engaging a protagonist as Smiley. However, I must ultimately knock-off a star because I, while no uncritical supporter of George Dubya and his Iraqi venture, somewhat resent being presented with an entertainment opportunity that becomes, in the end, simply a vehicle for the author to grind an ax, albeit cleverly done. John must be getting cranky in his old age.

Great tale of two very different men that became fast friends and spies. What tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. LE Carre is the best as always.

Absolute Friends is in some ways a typical LeCarre production: protagonist Ted Mundy is the son of a soldier of the British Raj, and former student radical who fails honorably at many pursuits but excels as a Cold War spy. He could be one of Smiley's people, one of the more eccentric denizens of the Circus. He has the ironic detachment and the shadows and sadnesses of LeCarre's best creations.

But Mundy is more ambiguous and interesting, and more appealing, than the typical LeCarre misfit. Brought up to think his mother, who died bearing him, was a member of the aristocracy, he learns that she was really an Irish servant. The discovery does not displease him: Mundy identifies with humble people and underdogs generally, from his love for the Pakistani Ayah who mothered him to his romantic attachment to a Turkish prostitute.

Like Smiley (and LeCarre himself), Mundy immerses himself in German at Oxford. There, he is radicalized by the left-wing beauty Ilse. His subsequent study in Germany brings him into contact with Sasha, an intense and radical student and a "weird little bugger," as Mundy observes toward the end of the book. Mundy's radical Berlin days, and apparently his friendship with Sasha, come to an end in a violent clash with the police. Afterward, Mundy tries and fails at many things, before returning to Britain to become an employee of a British arts council and to attempt a normal married life.

But Sasha comes back into Mundy's life when, as part of an international arts exchange, Mundy accompanies a troupe of actors into East Germany. There he meets Sasha again. Sasha has been seduced into the workers' paradise and has now, against his will, been recruited into the Stasi, the East German secret police. But the reader soon learns that Sasha is actually a double agent working with British intelligence. Soon, so is Mundy.

Once the Berlin Wall falls, Mundy's career in espionage ends. But he cannot escape Sasha, who returns to Mundy's life with a new project. LeCarre here begins a more swiftly plotted but ultimately unsatisfactory story dominated by a sinister, paranoid, and ruthless U.S. bent on eradicating terror.

LeCarre clearly has strong feelings about the Iraq War, about Blair and Bush, and about the U.S. as a malevolent "hyperpower." If you are at all pro-Bush or pro-Iraq War you will probably not enjoy this book very much. The book eventually descends into tiresome anti-American polemics, and the principal American character comes across as too relentlessly evil to be really credible.

I love LeCarre's work generally. I wanted to love this book, but only was able to admire it for its literary quality and deft craftsmanship. However, I am still looking forward to LeCarre's next.

In the beginning of Absolute Friends, I found myself wondering why Mr. Le Carre had put together such an unusual resume for his main character, Ted Mundy. Be patient with those details because Mr. Le Carre uses every one of them to develop his most intricate plot ever. This book will continue to surprise you with its plot twists and will reward careful reading. Those who have a very cynical view of the motives behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003 will love this book.
Brought up without a mother and with a distant father whose life was on the skids, Ted Mundy found himself looking for emotional connection. With a strong sympathy for the underdog and the oppressed, he finds himself some unusual friends among the radical community of his youth. Made of stern stuff, he willingly engages in helping them and becomes closely involved with antiauthoritarian Sasha in West Berlin. That unexpected connection becomes the central pivot of his life from then on. Try as he might to avoid it, he and Sasha are permanently linked through that youthful friendship. In essence, Ted Mundy's life becomes a resume that others are willing to interpret as supporting their views . . . and he finds himself unexpectedly draw into the espionage battles of the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mundy's past becomes valuable to those who want to create new perceptions today. In the process, Mundy finds his good intentions and friendship unintentionally subverted.
The jacket copy for this book is misleading. It suggests that the story is mostly about the mysterious Dimitri, the idealistic billionaire who wants to recruit Ted Mundy. Except for a brief introduction, that section of the book comes only at the end. Most of the book deals with a flashback into Mundy's life before meeting Sasha and his involvement with Cold War spying. A lot of the action occurs behind the Iron Curtain, and pieces of the book will remind you of Mr. Le Carre's marvelous stories about espionage into East Germany.
The book has an Achilles heel though in that Mr. Le Carre needs such an unusual combination of characters that the plot builds on what seemed to me to often be dense, unrealistic details. I kept wondering why he was making up such preposterous backgrounds for his characters. In the end, all became clear . . . but the story's eventual ending could have been told without all the background. The book feels like two books, loosely bound together by a limited tether three-quarters of the way through. Without the last section, this could have been a five-star Cold War book. With a simpler development of the last section, this could have been a four-star book about political chicanery. I found the way they were bound together was just too big a stretch for me. I found myself focusing on the author's plotting, rather than just accepting the story. I do, however, admire the mind that could put all these pieces together.
If you are like me, the ending will leave you stunned and feeling queasy. Mr. Le Carre has a powerful message for us about the dangers of believing that everything is what we are told. Be skeptical!
As I finished the book, I wondered again about the proper balance among our responsibility to ourselves, our loved ones and our loyalties to greater causes. Mr. Le Carre seems to suggest that we shouldn't be so idealistic . . . the price is too high. But isn't our idealism what makes us noble and admirable? Perhaps he means nothing more than that we shouldn't abandon all else for our idealism.

John Le Carre is a masterful writer and a brilliant teller of tales. This book, while not perhaps his best, nevertheless demonstrates his compelling skill of telling a story and his enduring ability to underscore paradox. Some reviewers have objected to his political position after the Cold War and post 9/11, however Le Carre is a master at negotiating the ambiguity of conflict at the level of both the individual and the state. Le Carre's works are not the place to find either a validation of the status quote or a comforting reaffirmation of political sensibilities.

This is vintage Le Carre with all of the wit and wisdom that his earlier works possess, and perhaps a sharper and more brittle edge. The characters enfold and entwine each other and we have seen glimpses of their persona in earlier Le Carre: they hark back to shadows in the world that Le Carre has so brilliantly created and sustained. But there is urgency, perhaps even anger, in his writing that occasionally breaks though the surreal world of the main characters.

In a sense, it's an old story - a timeless story perhaps - of the shadowy world and fantasies of those drawn into espionage more by personal default than ideological fervor. And in telling this story, John Le Carre once more demonstrates a profound insight into our individual fears and collective insanity. Not perhaps his best book but a beautifully written and powerfully conceived.

Unlike most of the negative reviewers, I am fairly sympathetic to Le Carre's basic message in this book--that the US has far overreached in the "war" on terrorism and that European governments have cynically gone along with the US.

But I found the book overwrought and unsubtle, which is surprising from the creator of Smiley's world where what was not said was more important than what was said. In Absolute Friends Le Carre takes off on radical cants and screeds from the late 1960's and early 1970's that last for dozens of pages and lead absolutely nowhere. The words he puts into his characters' mouths in the commune in West Berlin or Sasha's later "conversion" period read as if taken from the script of a really bad movie--stiff, hyperrevolutionary, unreal. I was active in the radical left in that period, and while the concepts and words he uses were tossed around in print and in a few beer-sotted discussions in dark bars, no one talked that way all the time or took themselves that seriously.

Saddest for me was that Le Carre made his main characters--Ted and Sasha--so blind as to be stupid. The reader has so much more insight into events than the main characters that we wind up wondering how they could be such blind idiots, how they can miss what is so obvious to anyone else. This disrespect for the characters was a major drawback to my enjoyment of the book. In the Smiley novels, there was plenty of self-ignorance, as there is in all of us, and this made the characters human. But in Ted and Sasha, we get cartoon characters who do not see the anvil balanced on the door they are about to open. It just does not ring true.

So, bully for the message, but I wish it had been contained in a better missive. One can only wonder what Alan Furst would have done with this material--likely far more subtle, quiet, and disquieting.

This book has some interesting characters, but the plot description is slightly misleading. The first chapter is in the present day, but after that we get an overlong flashback which basically is a biography of our protagonist, finally getting back to the present at about page 300. The "biopic" format was unnessecary, the main focus should've been on the present day portion of the story, with maybe a few flashbacks bookending it ala Godfather II.

The present day storyline:

British ex-spy Ted Mundy is living in Heidelberg Germany, running an English language school. Estranged from his first family, he has a ready made second family in the form of a Turkish fiancee and her young son. But the school's business partner turns out to be a crook, so Ted has to get a crappy job as a tour guide. He is then reuinted with a longtime acquaintance, a German anarchist named Sasha. Sasha is working for a counter culture guru named Dimitri, and Dimitri wants Ted to reopen his school and turn it into a "Counter University". But Dimitri's money comes from questionable sources, which causes concern for Ted, and his old CIA contact Jay Roarke, who is convinced of a terrorist plot to destroy Heidelberg. Are Sasha and Dimitri really terrorists or is the shady Roarke setting them up? It all leads to a violent, and tragic, finale. Too bad it takes so long for this plot to get rolling.

Don't listen to the silly, muddle-headed writer below: this is fine, well-written spy novel that, like all such books and films, stretches credibility at times, but still manages to wrap itself up nicely at the end with a climactic finish that is all the more thrilling because it is SO thoroughly BELIEVABLE. The novel makes it clear that LeCarre is a wise and broad-minded author who well understands the tangled mass of the new global media and its ramifications for international politics during times of War. Ultimately, his political message is nothing so crude and base as the "America is the root of all evil" line which the overly-defensive alarmist below accuses him of. Rather, this book is a sweeping, objective look at the ways people develop, act upon, promote, are blinded by, and ultimately fall victim to their own ideological fervor. Yes, at the end of the story America comes out looking bad, but let's face it: America is doing a pretty good job of THAT with or without LeCarre's help - He was simply smart enough to turn our recent follies into a genuinely good and wholly sincere work of fiction. A fun and thought-provoking read for readers of all political persuasions. Fans of The DaVinci Code take note!

You know LeCarre, right? Master of the spy novel. When the Cold War ended, I heard that his writing became obsolete before it was published. I think the world did that to all the espionage authors. Doesn't RED OCTOBER look incredibly dated, whether in book form or with Sean Connery reminding us what a fantastic actor he is?

Well, now America has another war, and LeCarre has written what may well be his finest novel. No small praise considering his resume, folks. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and all the other Smiley books. I like this one better. And, oddly enough, the "Large Print" edition is cheaper at the store. I can read it without my glasses.

This is well below average for le Carre, more conspiracy theory than tradecraft. Issues like character motivation are absent. Good for paranoid appetites, but nothing remotely like le Carre's better works.

Le Carre brings readers one of his most provocative novels to date, when former British spy Ted Mundy spends his days conducting tours of one of Mad King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. With a flashback to his earlier days, Ted recalls meeting friend and fellow supporter of Communism, Sasha, in Berlin, a friendship never totally forgotten, when Mundy decided to join Sasha's spying efforts years later and create a double life from his British diplomatic service. But it is Sasha's present-day reappearance at Ludwig's castle that changes Ted's future, as Sasha introduces him to Dimitri who mysteriously wants to fund Ted's now defunct language school in Heidelberg to turn it into an unusual Counter University.
Just who is Dimitri, what type of school is he interested in starting, and is Sasha a dupe, or is Ted Mundy the one to take the fall when a former CIA operative hones in? Author Le Carre draws the reader into Mundy's world of clashing ideals and cultures, from the deserts of Pakistan to the subversive politics of Berlin in the 1960's to present-day Germany, where no-one is exactly who they seem, even Mundy, who grapples with his own identity.

Absolute Friends is the 11th and (so far) the best Le Carre novel I have read. All the more pleasantly surprising given its relative lack of fanfare and average rating on the store. I must echo the thoughts of one other reviewer who speculates about just who are the people rating this book. I agree that some of JLC's post Cold War novels have perhaps not been quite up to the standard of earlier gems, but Absolute Friends is indeed vintage stuff from the master and IMHO even surpasses the great 'Spy Who Came In From The Cold' and 'Little Drummer Girl' which I would not have dared thought possible.

The protagonist Ted Mundy is a complex and wonderfully developed character in the classic JLC tradition. It charts his life over the course of 50 years but the author never labours too long in any particular spot. Rather, he's perfected the art of providing a minutely detailed story which spans half a century but never becomes prosaic. Sasha and the range of support characters such as Amory, Rourke, Kate and Zara are fleshed out and developed to the extent that I had genuine feelings towards each of them during the course of the story.

Absolute Friends is at once a modern history lesson about the Cold War, a sweeping tale of complex men caught up in greater forces and who - for all their crises of identity and moral uncertainties - are nevertheless decent and very human. It is also a frightening commentary on the post 9/11 world, and above all a brilliantly written and very moving piece of literature. Le Carre's best, and quite possibly the best of its genre.

John LeCarre's Absolute Friends is what I perceived to be an ingenious mix of political and social critique as well as an entertaining and heartfelt spy thriller. The erudite LeCarre uses brilliant characterisation coupled with an engaging plot to criticise American `democracy' and it's more than consistent propensity to engage in violence and war with other countries, particularly by the puritan, evangelist, pseudo democratic right wing fanatics that comprised the white house during the recent Bush administration. LeCarre's most powerful, influential weapons in portraying his left wind ideals aimed firmly at the colonial fist of regulation, are the original and inspired construction of the rather innocent, peripatetic Ted Mundy who is born to a drunken, negligent English army officer operating in British occupied Pakistan and the idealistic, radical East German `student turned spy' Sasha.

LeCarre enables us to witness Ted Mundy's life through a series of events that manipulate his ideologies; chiefly when he travels to East Germany to study and meets the anarchist, left wing activist Sasha where he becomes involved in the student marches of the 1960s and begins his loathing for unbridled capitalism. Both Mundy and Sasha become involved in espionage and benefit from operating as spies for their respective organisations, Mundy for the British and Sasha for the East German secret police, both men become lifelong friends and help each other extensively through their extraordinary, nomadic lives.

Mundy later settles down as a teacher and his previously vacillating life appears to be running smoothly in an unstable part of the world, this continues until he and his acting troupe attempt to smuggle a Polish boy through East Germany. This ensues to end in disaster as they are per sued by the Stasi and he is saved by his `absolute friend' Sasha who later perturbs him to return to the spy game to bring down the East German regime that the both spurn. This carries on until the Berlin wall comes down and they appear to go their separate ways. Mundy later marries a Turkish prostitute Zara and lands a job as a Bavarian castle tour guide. Just when he thinks he is out of the spy game forever his nihilistic comrade Sasha returns to his life and asks him to join him against the new problems of the 21st Century, the heavy handed imperialist zealots in the white house obstreperously exacting their geopolitical conquest on the innocent civilians of Iraq. A sequence of events leads to an unforgettable, powerful ending that only amplifies LeCarre's message.

One who reads this with an open mind should find this book highly enjoyable, mainly because of the intellectual vigour with which LeCarre writes coupled with his masterful use of memorable characters and settings to undermine modern imperialism. The reader can tell that LeCarre is enraged and livid at Bush and his fellow republicans and what he perceives to be a fast transforming `militant junta' blackened with dogma and punitative zeal for oil. He detests the government's `hijacking of America's post 9/11 psychopathy' to suggest complicity between terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while leaving the gloating sadists of Al Qaeda to carry on plotting their jihad against the western world. Unfortunately, this is where many readers will consider LeCarre to have fallen short, perhaps considering him to be too acerbic in his antipathy of American capitalist ideals which will more than likely deter his republican and right wing readers, but this is indisputably nonsense, LeCarre simply uses fiction to make a point in our contemporary world (the idea of all literature).

OK, John le Carre is always a bit predictable: His female characters are one-dimensional (sex goddess, mother, or overweight bully); the fathers con the sons. But he usually creates interesting male characters, his use of the language is always intelligent and admirable, and he usually creates great suspense.

After wading through a very long, slow beginning that took up nearly half the book, I nearly gave up. I saw none of the suspense that usually keeps me reading le Carre, and the two primary characters just didn't fire my imagination this time.

Then, at about midpoint, we watch the main character get sucked into the world of spying, and things got a bit more interesting, more suspenseful. This is what le Carre does better than anyone else: the double world of the spy, with all its tensions, sacrifices, and ambivalence.

Then about three quarters of the way through, it began to descend into a sermon. I will forgive an author many things, but sermonizing isn't one of them, whether I agree with him or not. Believable plot, characterization, and subtlety went out the window, and we ended up instead with an angry diatribe against the U.S., Christianity, Republicans, and corporations, all lumped together in le Carre's fire-breathing, apocalyptic, hell-and-brimstone conclusion. I'm not sure how much he'd appreciate being compared to a tent evangelist, but that's how the book reads in the end.

My one wish: that he'd save the rhetoric for the interviews and get back to writing good stories again. But after all the excellent thrillers he's given us over the years, I figure le Carre doesn't owe us anything at this point.

The story is straightforward: the story of Ted Mundy, a Pakistani-born Briton who randomly joins a 1960's era student protest group in West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a West Germany student anarchist named Sasha. Sasha defects to East Germany, and during the 1970s and 1980s Sasha feeds Mundy information about East Germany and Statsi. Mundy plays the role of a double agent and Sasha relishes the role of a turncoat.

The espionage story in itself is not remarkable, but the way LeCarre approaches the story is different; the psychological complexity here is akin to Graham Greene's "Human Factor". Both Mundy and Sasha are naive victims of circumstances, politics, borders, history and ideologies - a theme ripe in LeCarre's previous novels. Their friendship survives because both are rejects of the very societies that nourished them. Mundy must play the role of the British gentleman, but he could never truly aspire to become one. Sasha is the revolutionary hero, but his leftist ideology is more of a rebellion than a belief.

LeCarre notes the fall of the Wall as a small event, not important, just as a footnote of history. Yet, the wars in the Middle East are the major watershed. And it is during these times Sasha and Mundy once again conspire with grandiose schemes to combat American military and industrial globalization. In the end the two idealists end up the pawns of the very group they are protesting against.

Despite the great detail given about their pasts to explain their views and choices, I never developed much empathy for either of the main characters. While there was some interesting insight into anti-American sympathies, I couldn't really warm up to the villainy assigned to the American government. By the end I was really wondering why I had spent the time reading the book.

As perhaps the greatest living popular novelist, John Le Carre is that rare author whose works fit equally well in serious literary salons and tucked into the paperback rack at the airport magazine shop. The end of the Cold War deprived him not just of his signature world (espionage and internal government politics as conducted in the bipolar gaps between East Bloc and West) and characters (the carefully crafted spy "Circus" presided over by his avuncular master of tradecraft George Smiley) but also of his great existential theme: that the modern world is a shadowland of distanced betrayal, and that ultimately the small personal loyalties that occur in a life are the only motivations that can ever be called heroic with any certainty.

After some mediocre recent novels dealing with the dark but minor key worlds of drug-running and black market weapons sales, "Absolute Friends" finds LeCarre back on form with a novel that savagely blends his old imperialist and Cold War preoccupations with a commentary on the Bush/Blair war in Iraq. It's a tour de force on geopolitical and personal themes, and one of his finest examinations ever of maculine friendship and platonic love.

Though perhaps a shade less successful than his three finest novels (which to this reader are "The Russia House," "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," and the very undervalued "The Secret Pilgrim"), "Absolute Friends" is as good and as literary a novel of any stripe as we are apt to see distributed by a major American publisher in 2004.

Listening to Absolute Friends on audio I was struck by the extensive back story le Carre gives his characters Mundy and Sasha. It seemed like an ideal gift for a young friend who might be curious about how the sixties played out in Europe, but I got impatient waiting for him to tell the contemporary story forshadowed at the beginning as the cassettes rolled on. Perhaps this is the consequence of abridging a complex work.

While I've long been a fan of the skeptical, nuanced tales le Carre tells, this time I noticed that his women merely served as an excuse to explicate his heterosexual impulses and honorable execution of the domestic responsibility they create. Which , I fear, demonstrates that he's more comfortable with the past and its mores than the present. Still, I give him points for tackling the war in Iraq, which, lest we forget, was enthusicastically aided and abetted by the Brits.

I really knew better; I had read The Constant Gardener for heaven's sake. But in the airport shop, desperate for something to read on my next flight, I took the plunge. Le Carre is not the first of my favorite authors to get his devotees hooked on totally absorbing, intriguing books and then betray their trust, stabbing them in the back, inflicting his bitterness and hatred on them.

How could the author of The Spy who Came in from the Cold and the Smiley books do this to us? It took me three readings, two viewings of the TV series and copious notes on yellow pads to understand Tinker, Tailor thoroughly, and it was well worth the effort. George Smiley has to be one of the most fascinating characters of all time. And now, Absolute Friends?? Gimme a break.

After the first few pages, I'd decided to drop the book into the first trash receptacle at the next airport, but, curse the man, he is just so hopelessly INTERESTING. His choice of words is flawless. His wry wit provides more laughs per page than most humourists'. I have to agree with others that there are overlong passages of repetitive, boring philosophical diatribe, but it is easy to skip paragraphs and even entire pages and go on from there.

I've concluded that aging authors realize that they won't be here forever and they'd better get busy dispensing their political biases to their captive audiences while they still can. And instead of expressing their beliefs in honest, straightforward non-fiction, they know that they can rope in more devoted, trusting fans with exciting page-turners (and this book certainly is that.)

John, my advice to you, if you are determined to dispense your personal philosophy, is that you weave your political ideas into your plots with shorter, more frequent, less predictable doses, so that the reader absorbs them before realizing it, and can't just skip along, blithely ignoring the gratuitous philosophy.

(Fair warning, spoiler contained in this review)

John Le Carré is, without doubt, along with Len Deighton, one of the luminaries of the Cold War spy novel. To those born after 1985, the way things were when the 'superpowers' were the US and the Soviet Union must be mostly a historical curiosity 'before I was born'. The rest of us remember those days well. John Le Carré lived them, made his literary career based on them and unfortunately, doesn't seem to believe that anything important has happened in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In all fairness, Le Carré's George Smiley novels are undeniable classics. His later novels tend to replow old ground, and his writing style - by turns amusing, arch and enraged - hasn't changed or deteriorated much. It's pretty clear where Le Carré is on the political spectrum; all govenments are deceitful and brutal, ours (meaning the UK) ought to know better, but doesn't, the world is full of moral ambiguity. The problem is that Le Carré has always known that the lesser enemy is the UK government. With the fall of the USSR, he's been casting about for a greater enemy. With this book he's decided: The enemy of the world is the US, the "hyperpower".

Strangely, for a book that is supposedly written in the present day, there's no mention of the Pacific Rim countries -- China is pretty big these days, India is a comer, Japan and Korea are still in the game and even little North Korea and Iran have pretensions of developing nuclear weapons in order to sit at the big table and threaten like a major power.

In Le Carré's universe, no geography outside of England and Germany receives much attention (Pakistan gets a little attention for the sake of color and ethnic diversity). There is little evidence of the impact and change of technology post 1970; no high tech gear or weapons, computers rate hardly a mention, all that stuff is the responsibility of those offstage. It's as if the world's governments and secret services agreed that they will only do battle in the `70s and in places were German, Russian or English is spoken. This is an obvious conceit, and appears to be primarily based upon Le Carré's own background and history (murkily hinted at over the years as having involved some kind of secret intelligence work, but as he now states, involved very little; see [...] Many of Le Carré's anti-hero protagonists are sketchy self portraits; the badly-born expatriate, with a rogue father and a strange upbringing. This novel is no exception.

"Absolute Friends" is essentially an anti-American screed. The characters are trotted across England and Germany (and a bit of Austria) in various amusing spy adventures, they have various crises of conscience, but in the end, the whole plot is based upon the crude manipulations of shadowy ex-CIA operatives now hooked up with unnamed corporate and right wing religious interests to sacrifice innocent Europeans for the sake of oil, with the evil complicity of their own governments cravenly bowing to the Americans and the "neo-cons".

For a book that focuses so much on how much of a bad influence the Americans are, Le Carré seems not to know much about us. The sole American character of any importance is an old-school WASP spy from Boston, with a menacing geniality that makes him seem more British (to me, anyway) than American. I imagine that Le Carré has actually been to Boston (or at least to Harvard, which is across the river in Cambridge), on the lecture circuit, but he can't have stayed very long. He doesn't know the culture of New England or anywhere else in the US.

As other reviewers have noted, this book seems to portray the world battle against terrorism as based wholly upon lies, as if we haven't endured thirty years of airplane hijackings, school massacres, embassy bombings, invasions and assassinations perpetrated by Islamic extremists and funded by those who would profit from their violence. Le Carré also seems to uncritically accept that the US, (evilly, of course) goes to war principally to protect the oil companies that secretly run the government - apparently giving no thought to the long history of great power struggles over resources that determine the fate of societies. The North American economy certainly runs on oil - but so does Europe's, India's, China's and every other industrial nation's. It is simply impossible to believe that any government, corrupt or rigidly honest and humane would willingly surrender its fate and that of its' people's to the whim of Islamic fundamentalists. But ultimately, Le Carré seems to say "What's the fuss all about? These Arabs are really our true friends, it's the Americans that are the real problem".

That's another strange point of view of Le Carré's. Although he fancies himself a master of human ambiguity, the few Islamic types are all saintly women or children. None of them are cutting the heads of civil engineers on video, none are involved in "honor killings", there are no Islamic sharia court amputations, no frenzied mobs lynching victims, then waving their bloody hands in triumph for the cameras, no Al Qaeda torture chambers.

So what is this book, really? It's an anti-American screed, peopled with retread Le Carré characters acting as puppets for Le Carré to assert that all this fuss about terrorism is based upon lies and expert US manipulation of the press. While entertaining, it is itself a false document that plays to those anxious to have their anti-American and "progressive" values validated.

Ultimately, we should take this book, and Le Carré as he portrays himself, in his own words:

"The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks. I am regarded as a sage on every spy case from the double-agent Judas to your wretched Mr. Aldrich Ames.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception."

John le Carre's ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is an excellent read from an excellent author. The Cold War may be over, but the spying is not, especially now that terrorism and numerous hot wars have replaced their cold war cousins. Devotees of Cold War literature must have reveled in the first two thirds of this book, with its descriptions of 1960's protest movements and recollections of what used to be called East Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Remember them?

But the world's hegemon is no longer the USSR, is it? Two guesses as to which "hyperpower" has replaced it. It is this finger-pointing at one's own western self that has got the knickers of so many le Carre critics in a twist.

How can le Carre imply that America is the new bad actor? Just because we invaded and destroyed another country, continue to deny that our prisoners of war are actually Prisoners of War, reject as "not applicable" the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of prisoners, hide our captives from the Red Cross and their own governments, spy on our own citizens, and kidnap and render the innocent and guilty alike, is no reason to believe that we are somehow out of control, is it? After all, it's what made Britain Great; besides, other people are worse, aren't they? And for le Carre to imply that our military-industrial-espionage complex and its freedom-loving corporate sponsors are making a packet out of it all is just beyond the pale. Isn't it?

Just remember to say, as you reach the denouement of the book, "It's only a novel."

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"?

As the other reviews to date indicate, you will love this book or hate it according to your particular political and religious prejudices. Broadly, committed Republicans and fundamentalist Christians will hate it and seek to dismiss it as rubbish, Democrats and liberals will see it as an attempt to alert the world to what is happening before our eyes. The five stars show where I stand. There is too much evidence of the 'war of lies' and the people behind it for the plot to be anything but dangerously credible. The denouement of the book hits like a sledgehammer.

Standing back from the politics, the plot and the narrative are as gripping as his best previous work and his command of the detailed build-up of atmosphere remains quite stunning.

The shrill cries of "anti-American" written by other reviewers do not do justice to this well-thought out book. I love John LeCarre, and this book ranks among my favorites. He tracks the longtime friendship between a foreign-born Brit and an East German, both of whom were shaped by the traumas of their youth. On its own merits, the book is an excellent character study of not one but two characters. I enjoyed it tremendously. But, and this is more important to me, it made me think a lot more of the recent US policies, which have become increasingly arrogant. I am not a leftist but LeCarre is angry in his book and as I read it I felt myself becoming disturbed as well as he made me look at recent events in a different light. For that I would like to give this book 6 stars if I could. LeCarre fans will enjoy this book, and if you have not read LeCarre you might want to start with this one as it really shows him at his best.

Some flaws here, the most significant being that Mundy is mostly someone to whom things happen, rather than a person who makes things happen himself. Secondly, he's an awful lot like The Honourable Schoolboy's Jerry Westerby as a character type: a tall, affable Englishman who is lonely and overall a bit of a sad sack. Also, there are nearly 300 pages of backstory leading up to the present-tense action that, when all is said and done, is poorly built up and awkwardly concluded. And yet I kept turning the pages. I guess even a relative disappointment from le Carre is still a pretty good book.

Covering events spanning seven decades from the partition of India to today's war in Iraq, this novel tracks a pair of left thinking, anti-establishment men who, despite very different personalities, become and remain through the years "absolute friends." Le Carre examines the development of their poltical and social values, and he chronicles their on and off exploits as they move from 1960's Berlin revolutionaries to cold war spies and beyond.

The story is excellent, though it is guaranteed to offend some readers--particularly many American conservatives. Better than the storyline though, is le Carre's superb writing style and his complete command of the English language. His literary craftsmanship is truly remarkable.

leCarre has earned the right to write any book he wants, and so he created this shaggy-dog story with its believable trick ending to criticize the Iraq War and American hegemony--sentiments with which I whole-heartedly agree.

In service of which he writes beautifully and informatively about two sincere souls caught up in the divided loyalties of the Cold War--his favorite subject. And about Germany, his second-favorite subject. (Actually, to use Toby Esterhase's favorite word which leCarre resurrects for this book, the human soul and its condition in this world is his favorite subject as it is, of course, the favorite subject of all great writers.)

But ACT III of this drama, though regrettably believable in its facts, almost seems to belong to another novel. So ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is minor leCarre, full of atmosphere and character and detail and passion, but lacking in its plot: as I say in my title, "Flawed, but full of virtues."

Many reviewers have already documented the premise of this book, the charcters,ideology and the story line. As a devoted reader of John LeCarre I felt this was an important book. LeCarre's characters always maintain a certain aura of mystery and it is left to the reader to deduce the careful planning of these characters in the whole scheme of the book. If you are not willing to know "his people" as they lead their lives and the intertactions that forge such a bond, or the minds of rationale of their beliefs, then you are doing LeCarre a great injustice.
I found this a particularly interesting book and highly recommend it. I regret that some thought this book too political when, in fact, it is not as politically damning as it could have been had Mr Le Carre wove even more of the truth of the state of our world into this book of "fiction."

The protagonist of this lengthy spy novel is a British subject who answers to the name Ted Mundy. Much like Forrest Gump, Mundy is pulled from one phase of his life to the next on the tide of national and world events. Born the son of a British army major stationed on the Indian sub-continent, Mundy's life, in many ways, reflects the evolving relationship of Britain with the rest of the world. Almost by accident, Mundy is recruited into the shady world of espionage.
The title, Absolute Friends, refers to Mundy and an East German radical known as Sasha. The two of them meet as student activists and reconnect later in life, both before and again after the end of the Cold War.
To be honest, Absolute Friends is overly long and tedious in places. The disappointing ending is farfetched to the point of being almost surreal. For diehard le Carre fans only.

It seems silly now to recall all that hand-wringing about whether the end of the Cold War would mean curtains for the spy novel. John Le Carre brilliantly explored other options for intrigue in "The Constant Gardner," but now he's put his old German trench coat back on in a novel that burns with indignation but falls short of "Gardner"'s humanity and complexity.
In "Absolute Friends" the kind-hearted son of a British Army officer in India named Ted Mundy and Sasha, the crippled son of a former Nazi, form a bond that begins in the 1960s. The easy-going Ted has, mostly through his inability to say no to anyone, been a double agent in the pre-Wall-fall days. Ted used his earnings to open a language school in Germany, which went under when he was defrauded by a partner. Now Ted is sort of on the lam, working as a tour guide at Mad Ludwig's Castle in Bavaria and living with a Turkish woman and her son. He is happy. After many years of silence, Sasha contacts him, saying that an anonymous benefactor needs Ted's linguistic and teaching skills in a plan to counter pro-Iraq-war propaganda. Ted's desire to do good is reengaged, and he accepts the assignment.
I've always found Le Carre's spy world of "tradecraft," "handlers," and "little Jews" (or whatever ethnic group he's discussing) too precious and British public school to really resonate with me, and I was much taken with how well he applied the new rules of the alleged new world order to a truly desperate area like Africa. "Absolute Friends" will please fans of the Cold War books with its concentration on the minutiae of the spy game and its personalities. Ted is a fully-developed character, not quite believeable, but appealing. Sasha, on the other hand, remains a cipher and it is difficult to understand why his friendship is so important to Ted. Le Carre's new book is a good read, but the intelligence with which he probed the issues in "The Constant Gardner" made it seem as though he were setting on a new, exciting path that could be a model for the genre.

I bought this book as a Christmas present to myself. That it took me a couple of months to finish it says I didn't find it an exciting read. It was tedious, although filled with great excitement and the old LeCarre spark in parts. The problem I have with this book is it's probably too real. It's like watching bowell surgery on TV. Absolutely honest and disgusting because it is. I'm tired of all the corruption and betrayal in the world. I don't need it in my fiction too.

Absolute Friends' (John le Carre, 2003) Ted Mundy is a colossal character. Knead dependable mom, versatile dad, war-vet uncle, compassionate aunt, obtuse brother, faithful sister, grandfather of wisdom, loyal great-grandmother and best-man/best friend followed by cloth cover at room temp. Out comes a unique blend of afterthoughts that gel into unique, authentic and unreproducible impressions of world news as it's conveyed. Unfortunately, John le Carre (like many others) is the exception, not the rule.

When a master artist sharpens his pen, his words can cut to the quick. In Absolute Friends, le Carre has done just that. This haunting story leaves us not with the famililar and therefore comfortable le Carre ambilvalence about the morality of his characters, their profession, and their actions, but with a stark vision of the terrifying reality in which we live today.
Perhaps its starkness is why some reviewers here seem disappointed with this stunning work. Other reviewers perhaps found the novel's inherent critiques and probing questions too deeply troubling. Still others, unaccustomed to storytelling of this caliber, may have become impatient with the amount of backstory required to bring Ted and Sasha, Amory and Jay to such vivid life that the novel's end could feel so heartbreakingly devastating.
For myself, I might have preferred this dramatic tale to end on a note of hope for the future of our society, but no. Instead, our absolute friend Mr. le Carre has offered us the greater gift of a heartfelt wakeup call--and a priceless mirror reflecting how we in the West are viewed today by the vast majority of people around the globe.

The underlying theme of "Absolute Friends" is a profound fear and distrust of "fundamentalism" in all its guises; whether found in Islamic terrorist movements or in the "In God We Trust" born again "true believers" who le Carre sees as having hijacked power in America. The protagonists, as always w/ le Carre, are carefully and lovingly drawn. Le Carre yearns, in a sense, for the moral ambiguity that underpinned his cold war spy novels. He finds the "fundamentalism" the fuels actions based on simplistic conviction far scarier than the ideological complexity and confusion that drove much of post WWII history before the last decade. Islamic fundamentalism and its equally evil twin, and twined foe, Christian "evangelical" fundamentalism (which he sees in power in the US today), are ...well just made for each other and the destruction of "decency" that uncertainty can engender.

Teddy Mundy, old friend, is so absolutely believable you smell his sweater.
But by design Sasha remains a vague and distant shadow. LeCarre means for Sasha to irritate readers so they marvel at the pearl of Teddy's lavish loyalty to a naïve ideologue.
In the end though, Sasha is just another "cause," a foil for Teddy's compassion, another person in need of rescue--like Zara and Mustafaa and everyone else in Teddy's life. Teddy is, afterall, an adult child of an alcoholic caring for everyone to his own demise.
So you are pulling hard for Teddy, absorbed in his every movement and thought and hope and his new wife and kid and in the end you don't see the cheap lefty sucker punch.
And that's where the novel fails and crystallizes into political cant so ridiculous that one can only conclude LeCarr was in a hurry to get this one to press. When it turns out Sasha's crazy fascist conspiracies were correct all along you get an ending you suspect a 19 year-old Deaniac might have written.

While reading this book I got the distinct impression that it was changed in mid-course. It was as if le Carre had written 300 pages of a taut cold war thriller when the invasion of Iraq occurred, and he diverted the course of the story so that he could deliver a personal diatribe against American hyper-power hegemony. He would have been better served to use the subtlety and character development he is so famous for rather than stick-figure neo-con caricatures to deliver his message.

I have read every book that le Carre has ever written, and enjoyed most immensely. Let us hope he returns to form in the future.

I'll admit, up front, to being an "America-hating liberal" who agrees with about every statement Mr. Le Carre makes in this book. I'm a card-carrying dubya-hater and sometimes think I would love to move to Canada. That said, this is not Mr. Le Carre's best work. It is a rant disguised as a novel. Which is precisely what Le Carre intends, but if readers pick it up looking for his usual nuance, subtlety, and moral shadings, they will find it lacking. The first 300 or so pages are vintage le carre, as they trace protagonist Ted Mundy's life from birth through a shadowy cold war spy-land. But the last 150 pages are an excuse for the author to vent his spleen, which doesn't come naturally. It's rushed, poorly plotted, and disappointing. However, on the whole the book is a fairly good read, a good story, and thought provoking, and I'd recommend it- even to a conservative.

His command of the language is irrefragable, nor at any place in the story does his freedom to explore all facets of the characters that inhabit his underworld deteriorate. Having just finished the book, I can only announce the emergence of John LeCarre onto a new and higher plane, as a writer, story teller and, yes, even as a commentator on the human condition.
This book delivers everything a LeCarre afficianado has come to expect. Early in the going his prose has you mentally leaning forward as the story speeds toward the center where LeCarre commandingly slows the gait to allow a full sample of his character expressions. Masterful!
But then he trumps that with several clever and thought provoking scenes that allow us to wander a bit farther afield from any place he has previously allowed us to peek. I enjoyed the freedom and hope for a promise of more. Please sir, more.

The biggest problem I have with this book is the "friendship" of Ted and Sasha. I just don't get it. We keep hearing that Sasha is "charasmatic", but he sure doesn't seem so - not in the '60's and not in the present. He just seems like an angry teenager, who can't stop railing against his father. And Ted - let's face it - is only slightly more interesting.

Although I agree with the anti-Iraq war message of the book, it really becomes tedious, and it's not a good enough reason to read this book. I did hang in until the very end, which just seemed tacked on. It didn't build to this conclusion, it rushed to it.

If you are looking for a story with boring and confusing characters, but with a strong political message, read the book. If not, pass on it.