If you feel that good novels are the lie that reveals the truth, then it will always be thrilling, in any given period, to come across works that manage to be much more revealing than the evening news. John le Carré made that kind of thrill into a genre, capturing the dowdy, fatal, realistic weather of European espionage at a time when the subject was covered on the BBC as if it were merely a parlor game beloved of donnish existentialists.
Even today, with his most groundbreaking novels behind him, le Carré continues to be the world's most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia: his books conceive of a Western world that has a costly obsession with its possible enemies; he shows you this world's secret missions, its botched jobs, its manifold attempts to thwart the corrupting and sometimes terrifying idealism of others, while keeping the reader close to the exact lineaments of the way we live now.
Even today, with his most groundbreaking novels behind him, le Carré continues to be the world's most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia: his books conceive of a Western world that has a costly obsession with its possible enemies; he shows you this world's secret missions, its botched jobs, its manifold attempts to thwart the corrupting and sometimes terrifying idealism of others, while keeping the reader close to the exact lineaments of the way we live now.
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