His American Characters Are Cartoons: James Srodes On John le Carre's 'A Delicate Truth

James Srodes reviewed John le Carre's A Delicate Truth for the Washington Times.

I confess to being a fan of John le Carre, both for his skill at storytelling and for the razor-sharp characters he creates. Laser portraits of even secondary characters make the reader believe he actually knows people like that.

I also like and admire David Cornwell, the man behind the nom de plume. Unlike many writers of crime and espionage literature, Mr. Cornwell has walked the walk. He worked for both Britain’s MI-5 (domestic counter-intelligence) and MI-6 (foreign intelligence) cracking safes, tapping telephones, running agents and other covert ops. Indeed, he was so employed when he wrote his first two books, “Call for the Dead” (1961) and “A Murder of Quality” (1962), both of them worth a read, by the way.
 

... The one flaw is one that is common to all of Mr. le Carre’s books. David Cornwell positively despises Americans and particularly those connected with the U.S. intelligence services. His indictment at base is one shared by many Britons of the left and is fueled in part by the newspapers they read (the Guardian) and it lies mainly in the undeniable fact that we are definitely not British. Not only are we far too polyethnic but we just refuse to order our society along proper British lines.

The result is that while Mr. Cornwell is unsurpassed in drawing acute portraits of his own national characters, his Americans are cartoons. One of the main villains in the story here is a wealthy woman who bankrolls Ethical Outcomes. She is a Texan (of course), coarse and bumptious (what else?), a Tea Party loony (sigh) and, most damning of all, a born-again Christian. His treatment of U.S. spy services is equally cliche-ridden.

I am sure Mr. Cornwell despises Americans because he told me so. Once, back in the early 1980s, I was introduced to him in a smoky Fleet Street pub frequented by journalists by an Australian newsman who had served as one of Mr. le Carre’s stock characters in several books. While he was cordial enough to me at the start, as the night wore on he became ever more bitter about America and its clumsy, self-indulgent national character which had given the world the Vietnam War, race riots, Richard Nixon and a host of other plagues.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/19/book-review-a-delicate-truth/

You can also read my column Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer about John le Carre and Ian Fleming via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html 

John Le Carre's Latest Spy Thriller Is Ponderous, Heavy-Handed And Obvious

Michiko Katutani offers an interesting review in the New York Times of John le Carre's latest spy thriller.

“A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré’s new thriller, is anything but delicate: it’s ponderous, heavy-handed and obvious — everything that his wonderful early Smiley novels, which traded in moral ambiguity and psychological nuance, were not.

Although Mr. le Carré hit his stride again in 2010 with "Our Kind of Traitor," this new novel resembles two preachy recent books of his, "Absolute Friends," (2004) and "A Most Wanted Man" (2008). It is so hobbled by ideological fervor — a detestation for the way the United States and Britain have waged the war on terror — that it rapidly devolves into a didactic and ungainly pitting of good against evil with an utterly predictable story line.       

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/books/a-delicate-truth-by-john-le-carre.html?_r=0

John Le Carre's Very British Features

British book reviewers have been praising John le Carre's new spy thriller so effusively that it was good to see a reviewer knock the novel.

Novelist Frederic Raphael reviewed le Carre's latest in the Times Literary Supplement.

John le Carré is the grand master of the low down. That he writes under a pseudonym seems emblematic of a writer who has made himself shady the better to be at home in the dark places of the world of double-dealing. His novels are those of a worldly, wise moralist whose opinions are implicit in devious plots in which good men are regularly done down or find themselves warped by force majeure.

A Delicate Truth begins “On the second floor of a characterless hotel” in Gibraltar, where “a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom. His very British features, though pleasant and plainly honourable, indicated a choleric nature brought to the limits of his endurance”. Hustled into identifying with a decent chap in an unpleasant spot (with a bed “big enough for six”), the reader has little time to wonder what “very British features” look like and how they can be deemed “honourable” on sight while being simultaneously engorged with rage. Despite his parading all these manifestly insular qualities, “it would not have occurred to many people, even in their most fanciful dreams, that he was a middle-ranking British civil servant, hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity”. That would indeed make for a fanciful dream. 

... Le Carré appends a grateful list of sources who have instructed him on today’s military-politico-plutocratic amalgam. My own contacts in MI6 are meagre, but I am promised, with some vigour, by a veteran with “very British features” that no straight diplomat would have been deputed to officiate on such a mission – which must show how little your average old hand knows (or tells) about what really, really now goes on. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1249873.ece 

Note: Although I don't subscribe to John le Carre's leftist worldview and anti-Americanism, I'll read the novel when it come out in America and I'll publish my views here.

A Delicate Truth: John Le Carre Gets Personal For New Novel

 

Jon Stock in the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on spy thriller writer John le Carre's new novel.

David Cornwell, better known as the spy writer John le Carré, has always enjoyed keeping secrets — the real-life inspiration for spymaster George Smiley, for example, or le Carré’s own role with British Intelligence. Sooner or later he breaks, telling us that Smiley was based on the Rev Vivian Green, his tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, and that he once worked for MI5 and later MI6, but you can’t help feeling that the information is always extracted under duress.

So it is a pleasant surprise that le Carré has decided to reveal, without the use of electrodes or bright lights, that his much-anticipated 23rd novel is his most autobiographical for years, a book that “comes closer to my skin than any of my more recent novels”. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9972523/John-le-Carre-gets-personal-for-new-novel.html

You can also read my review of John le Carre's previous novel, Our Kind of Traitor, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, via the below link:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/LeCarreOurKindOfTratiorReview.jpg

And you can read my Crime Beat column on John le Carre and Ian Fleming, Spy Writer vs Spy Writer, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html