Our Kind of Traitor: John le Carr� - Softcover

Carr�, John Le

3.46

12,780 ratings by Goodreads

9780241975015: Our Kind of Traitor: John le Carr�

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241975018 ISBN 13: 9780241975015

Publisher: Penguin, 2016

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An English couple, Perry and Gail, are taking an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis.

What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment.

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Review:

Our Kind of Traitor is a reminder – if such a thing were needed – that John le Carr� is comfortably still at the top of the tree in arena of the intelligent thriller; he is still writing books for readers who want some texture to their genre reading. But – to rehearse the old debate -- is le Carr� a genre writer – or simply a first-rate novelist? Very few would now argue with the latter assessment. The Spy who Came in from the Cold, his first real-calling card book, took the world of espionage thrillers by storm back in 1963, and that brilliantly written examination of the betrayal and duplicities of the Cold War both changed the face of the spy novel and marked le Carr� out as the essential writer in the field – a badge he’s sported ever since. Subsequently, the much-acclaimed series of novels featuring the subtle spymaster George Smiley (inaugurated with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 1974) made much else in the field seem superficial and unambitious. While there was a move away from the pared-to-the-bone precision of the earlier books, the sprawling canvas of the Smiley sequence allowed the author to add new levels to the popular novel, making them as rich as more overtly ‘literary’ fare.

After recent work taking on American foreign policy (a b�te noir of the author) and the big pharmaceutical companies, le Carr� has returned to the concision of his early work, and in Our Kind of Traitor has delivered one of his most sheerly satisfying novels in years.

Britain is suffering under the recession, and a young couple – a leftish academic and his girlfriend (who is in the legal profession) – escape a depressed UK for a leisurely break on the Caribbean island of Antigua. But a meeting with a Russian millionaire by the name of Dima plunges the couple down the rabbit hole in a dizzying, picaresque odyssey in which the worlds of the City of London and the shadowy corridors of espionage collide.

In many ways, this is quite unlike any other John le Carr� novel, even as it utilises familiar tropes. And the surprises here (which it would be criminal to reveal) demonstrate that one of our greatest writers – to his considerable credit – is refusing to stand still. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

A story with frenzy at its heart . . . A compelling tale of deceit, dialogue and the author's own despair (James Naughtie)

[A] bullet train of a thriller . . . part vintage John le Carr� and part Alfred Hitchcock (The New York Times)

If you want to know about the state of Britain today, forget the Booker shortlist. Just read John le Carr�'s latest thriller (Evening Standard)

Return of the master . . . Having plumbed the devious depths of the Cold War, le Carr� has done it again for our nasty new age (The Times)

Few literary novels can boast a set of characters so vividly imagined. A teasing, beguiling, masterly performance (Sunday Times)

A remarkable book by the master (Daily Telegraph)

Pitch perfect. Le Carr�'s greatest gift may be his ear, which allows him to pick up a tremor of fear in the softest voice or a false note in any exchange of words and play with them to his heart's content (Sunday Telegraph)

One of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man's land (Los Angeles Times)

I would suggest immortality for John le Carr�, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers working today (Chicago Tribune)

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