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With A Most Wanted Man, legendary spymaster John le Carré tackles the "War on Terror" with this incisive critique that doubles as a stunning thriller. Espionage fans — and people who question the stories we're fed on front pages — will be riveted. Recommended by Chris Bolton, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
New spies with new loyalties, old spies with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good but caught in the moral maze; all the sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love or pity and remain good "patriots" — this is the fabric of John le Carré's fiercely compelling and current novel A Most Wanted Man.
A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.
Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client's survival becomes more important to her than her own career — or safety. In pursuit of Issa's mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg.
Annabel, Issa and Brue form an unlikely alliance — and a triangle of impossible loves is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the "War on Terror," the rival spies of Germany, England and America converge upon the innocents.
Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.
Review:
"When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa at the start of this morally complex thriller from le Carr (The Mission Song), they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov, a Red Army colonel whose considerable assets are concealed in a mysterious portfolio at a Hamburg bank. Tommy Brue, a stereotypical flawed everyman caught up in the machinations of spies and counterspies, enters the plot when Issa's attorney seeks to claim these assets. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le Carr effort is far above the common run of thrillers." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
Not satisfied, apparently, with continuing to write his generally first-rate novels, John le Carre has now taken to reviewing them as well. On the front cover of the advance edition of "A Most Wanted Man" is reproduced a letter from the great man addressed to "Dear Reader": "New spies with new loyalties, old ones with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good, but caught... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in the moral maze; all the good, sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love, or pity, & remain good 'patriots' — I'm pleased with the way this novel turned out. Best, John le Carre." So what, after that, is the mere reviewer to do? Were he or she to say, perhaps, that "John le Carre has written an interesting new novel about decent people wanting to do good, but trapped in moral dilemmas," readers would say that this interpretation merely parrots and paraphrases le Carre's, and they would be right. One of the reviewer's tasks, after all, is to interpret a book as well as to pass judgment on it, but in this instance, le Carre has done all our interpreting for us, and has even tacked on the judgment that he is jolly well happy about what he has written. Probably, his self-satisfied little note was written for booksellers rather than reviewers, but since it has landed in the laps of reviewers as well, it has the feeling of a pre-emptive strike. There's just one problem. Though le Carre's interpretation of his novel's themes is accurate enough, his judgment of its literary worth is considerably inflated. As one who has reviewed his work for more than three decades, always with admiration and at times with unfettered enthusiasm, I'd place "A Most Wanted Man" toward the lower end of the 21 novels he has now written. It is intelligent, of course, and immensely informative about espionage and the people who engage in it, but its prose occasionally is flabby (especially when the heroine is involved), the feelings its central characters have for each other are utterly unconvincing, and it ends on a note of cliched, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that I find repellent. Now in his late 70s, le Carre perhaps has earned the right to phone a novel in, and phoned-in is what this one is. It is set in Hamburg: "Nobody was likely to forget, be he Muslim, police spy or both, that the city-state of Hamburg had been unwitting host to three of the 9/11 hijackers, not to mention their fellow cell-members and plotters; or that Mohammed Atta, who steered the first plane into the Twin Towers, had worshipped his wrathful god in a humble Hamburg mosque." A young Chechen Muslim calling himself Issa, "stateless, homeless, an ex-prisoner and illegal," shows up at the modest residence of Leyla Oktay and her son Melik, immigrants from Turkey who are in the city on temporary residency permits. They are good people, and they welcome Issa almost immediately, Leyla treating him as a son and Melik as a brother. He is referred to Sanctuary North, "a Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany," and his case is taken over by Annabel Richter, a no-nonsense young lawyer there. Tough cookie she may be, but she manages to convince herself in no time flat that Issa's story is true: that he had been imprisoned and tortured in Turkey, had escaped to Denmark and from there to Germany, and had a large amount of money waiting for him at "the private banking house of Brue Freres PLC, formerly of Glasgow, Rio de Janeiro and Vienna, and presently (sic) of Hamburg," the head of which is the 60-year-old Tommy Brue, "the bank's sole surviving partner and bearer of its famous name." The money had been left to Issa by his father, a wholly corrupt Russian gangster who raped and eventually murdered the young Chechen girl who gave birth to Issa. Everyone is awash in emotions. Issa is afraid of being thrown back into prison and tortured. Tommy, trapped in an unhappy marriage to a faithless wife, finds himself falling for Annabel, who is (of course) lovely and sexy as well as smart. As for Annabel, she is on a mission: "The moment I sat down with Issa and heard his story, I knew that this was where the system stops, that this was the unsavable life I must save, that I must think of myself not as a lawyer but as a doctor like my brother Hugo and ask myself: What is my duty to this injured man, what sort of a German lawyer am I if I leave him in the legal gutter to bleed to death?" She says she's "doing this for the principle, not the man," but there comes a moment "when she felt most inclined to fall in love with him, when intimacy on such a scale became an act of stupendous generosity, and her whole being was responding to him," though "that way lay the negation of the promise she had made to herself: to put his life — and not his love — before law." Others take a considerably less sanguine view of Issa. Many of these are to be found in "the cramped quarters of the Foreign Acquisitions Unit of Hamburg's grandly named Office for the Protection of the Constitution — in plain language, domestic intelligence service," especially in the offices of "The Unit," directed by Gunther Bachmann, an ace intelligence operator who is trying to reform and improve German intelligence. Bachmann, who is by far the most interesting character in the novel, has this to say about Issa: "We're looking for a man who has no patronymic and no relationship with normality. His record tells us he's a militant Chechen-Russian who does violent crime and bribes his way out of Turkish jail — and what the hell was he doing there anyway? — gives the slip to the Swedish port police, buys himself back onto the boat he comes off, smuggles himself out of Copenhagen docks, charters himself a lorry to Hamburg, accepts a beaker of refreshment from an elderly fat bastard whom he engages in conversation in Christ knows whose language, and wears a gold Koran bracelet. Such a man deserves our considerable respect. Amen?" Thus the lines are drawn between Issa, Annabel and Tommy on one side, the intelligence operatives on the other. There is a further division within intelligence, between hard-liners who believe that "high-profile arrests will serve as a deterrent to Islamist sympathizers, and restore confidence in those responsible for seeking them out" and more nimble thinkers who reason as Bachmann does: "We are not policemen, we are spies. We do not arrest our targets. We develop them and redirect them at bigger targets. When we identify a network, we watch it, we listen to it, we penetrate it and by degrees we control it. Arrests are of negative value. They destroy a precious acquisition. They send you scrabbling back to the drawing board, looking for another network half as good as the one you've just screwed up." A good point well made, and a considerably more important one to this novel than any of the themes cited by le Carre in his letter to readers. As he writes elsewhere, "in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who's been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth." Such a "base of knowledge" is what Bachmann is trying to create within Germany's Muslim community, and what the hard-liners — in British and American as well as German intelligence — are vigorously resisting. How this conflict plays out is essential to the novel's conclusion. The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carre — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in "A Most Wanted Man" with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author's opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition. The CIA people who crash onto the scene at the end are mere cartoons. Le Carre, who is capable of great subtlety and nuance, here is all bludgeon and righteous anger. It is not pretty to watch, and it diminishes him. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com. Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Review:
"The old spy master hasn't lost his touch....Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review:
"[L]e Carré, without lecturing, deftly puts human faces and human costs on the paranoid response to the threat of terrorism." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"There is very little conventional action in this novel, but the tension builds anyway, as we watch the slow, inexorable, almost boring way that institutional will grinds down individual lives." Booklist
Synopsis:
Hailed as "the literary master for a generation" (The London Observer), New York Times-bestselling author le Carre returns with a stunning, compelling work set in Hamburg — a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.
John le Carré was born in 1931 and lives in Cornwall, England. His eighteen novels have been translated into thirty-seven languages and include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Smiley's People, and The Constant Gardener.
Peggy J, August 12, 2009 (view all comments by Peggy J)
I listened to this on CD and couldn't turn it off. It is a compelling post-9/11 tale of the way in which money, terrorism, and immigration all come together and the public just isn't aware! Cautionary tale to say the least.
Denise Morland, December 14, 2008 (view all comments by Denise Morland)
A Most Wanted Man is a spy novel extraordaire with themes more relevant to today's issues then most other thrillers I've read. Highlighting the war on terror and they way it has altered rationality, this is a book that should hit close to home for anyone. Issa, a young Russian with horrific scars, comes mysteriously to be in Hamberg. A devout Muslim, he is quickly under suspcion from all sides. Annabel, a young German lawyer is determind to prevent the government from deporting him and she drags a wealthy British banker into her cause. It's a game of cat and mouse as the rival spies try to find proof of Issa's terrorist connections.
I listened to this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. John le Carre reads the book himself, and he does a good job of it. I found the plot to be frighteningly plausible. I liked the main characters and especially enjoyed the relationships between Issa, Annabelle, and Tommy Brue. This is a book peopled with realistic people caught in unimaginably terrifying circumstances!
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (5 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
carusod22, December 3, 2008 (view all comments by carusod22)
Most Wanted Man is scary as hell. i know it’s just fiction, but i always read Le Carre’s novels as journalistic reportages. In this case, the troubles stay in our home, right in Europe, where different intelligence services pull togheter to stop potential islamic-terroristic activities in the name of global security. It doesn’t matter if the suspects are innocent. Secret intelligence is depicted as a dangerous role-play led by the americans. True or not, the novel is masterly written and the rithm never bore you. Hoping for a wide-screen version, I suggest this book to everyone.
Daniele Caruso, Firenze, 2008
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (5 of 13 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
336 pages
Scribner Book Company -
English9781416594888
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Chris Bolton,
With A Most Wanted Man, legendary spymaster John le Carré tackles the "War on Terror" with this incisive critique that doubles as a stunning thriller. Espionage fans — and people who question the stories we're fed on front pages — will be riveted.
by Chris Bolton
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa at the start of this morally complex thriller from le Carr (The Mission Song), they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov, a Red Army colonel whose considerable assets are concealed in a mysterious portfolio at a Hamburg bank. Tommy Brue, a stereotypical flawed everyman caught up in the machinations of spies and counterspies, enters the plot when Issa's attorney seeks to claim these assets. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le Carr effort is far above the common run of thrillers." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"The old spy master hasn't lost his touch....Highly recommended."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"[L]e Carré, without lecturing, deftly puts human faces and human costs on the paranoid response to the threat of terrorism."
"Review"
by Booklist,
"There is very little conventional action in this novel, but the tension builds anyway, as we watch the slow, inexorable, almost boring way that institutional will grinds down individual lives."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
Hailed as "the literary master for a generation" (The London Observer), New York Times-bestselling author le Carre returns with a stunning, compelling work set in Hamburg — a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.
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