Lady Sharon and Mr. Selnes

Earlier this week the Melfort Public Library held a tea in honour of the Downton Abbey T.V. series coming to an end. The last show was broadcast in the U.S. and Canada on Sunday. As a member of the Library Board the staff asked me if I would be the butler. The results are in the accompanying photo.

Lady Sharon accompanied me to the tea and is the well dressed and far better looking Lady with me in the photo.

 

The tea was great fun.

It was a typical rural Saskatchewan event.

You can see the effort the staff made to set up lovely tables.

Board members loaned tea cups and silver services. We provided 6 teacups and saucers and a complete tea service.

Staff and board members prepared the food.

The staff wore costumes appropriate to the event and served.

I greeted the Ladies. There was only one other gentleman.

Once coats had taken by the staff I escorted ladies to the tables.

I understand I was a credible butler. While I might have a future as a butler it will not be in Melfort. Not a butler in the community.

There were trivia games on tea etiquette and the Downton Abbey series. Sharon and I tied as winners of the Downton Abbey trivia. I won on a tiebreaker question as to the cast name for their historic adviser – “The Oracle”. I picked out a prize of English teas and gave the box to Sharon.

We enjoyed crustless sandwiches, scones with lemon curd and clotted cream, small cakes and dainties.

There were a couple of musical selections from the teenage member of the staff. The first was the series theme song which actually has words. I had never heard them We sang along with her on the second song.

Most guests wore costumes. Sharon’s outfit was actually what she wore to our son’s wedding last fall. She has been looking for suitable events to wear her hat again. The tea was the perfect occasion.

More photos are on the Melfort Public Library Facebook Page.

And the pricing was rural Saskatchewan. Each of the guests paid $5.00.

A Letter to Roger Angell on This Old Man Finished

Roger Angell and Andy in Central Park in 2014

In my last post I put up the first half of a letter to Roger Angell about my thoughts on his recent book, This Old Man. This post contains the rest of the letter.

****

(Continuing my letter to Roger)

I have admired how your love of baseball is not limited to the stars of the game. I enjoy reading your stories about spring training as much as any climatic regular season game or World Series games.

One of my favourite essays you have written is from one of your earlier books, Late Innings, in which you exchanged correspondence with and then meet Linda Kittell to sit and talk about baseball and life while watching her partner, Ron Gable, pitching semi-pro baseball. It is the baseball I know best.

Linda spoke so powerfully about Ron’s earlier pursuit of a distant dream of the major leagues while playing for the Boise Buckskins in the lowest of the minor leagues. And you listened.

In your essays I appreciate how you will develop a thought over a few pages. A reader is invited to think with you about the subject of your essays. I slow down when reading you. With most of my reading, especially on the internet, I find myself rushing through articles. Most are so short or so limited in content or both that I feel they were meant to be read in a hurry.

It took me until reading This Old Man to read your non-sport essays. I envy few people but your combination of contacts and interviews with authors and athletes left me envious of your life. I know of no other person who analyzes author Vladimir Nabokov in one essay and Hall of Fame ballplayer, Jackie Robinson, in another.

I admire how you follow the precept “be clear” set out by your stepfather, E.B. White, in Elements of Style which you quoted in an early essay of This Old Man. When I read your essays I know your themes and can follow your reasoning.

As a lawyer I strive to write with directness to make it easy for the judge to understand my submissions. For most legal briefs I have my clients read the whole brief. If they struggle to follow and grasp the facts and issues and arguments as I have set them out I know that I need to revise the brief.

I have come to appreciate grace in action in different forums. Watching a skilled lawyer in court is a pleasure. A well-presented oral argument can be a model of persuasion. A deft cross-examination can shift the course of a trial.

A challenging form of written grace is humour. You have the ability to make me smile. My wife would say I should read more of your work. I am not thinking of the strident LOL notations of emails and texts. It is the subtler grin that often stretches across my face while reading your essays and haikus.

I did initially struggle with your recommendation at the opening of This Old Man to feel free as a reader to move around in the book. I have always read books from start to finish. I was convinced to move around when I encountered some of your poetry. I expect your poetry is well done but the essays and letters are what I enjoyed best in the book.

Belated congratulations on winning the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. Reading your remarks at Cooperstown reminded me that when I was in my early 20’s and finally had some disposable income the first subscription I purchased was to The Sporting News. It was my portal to the big leagues. The only newspaper coverage in Saskatchewan of the major leagues at that time was through wire service stories. I devoured the baseball articles of The Sporting News even though they were a couple of weeks old by the time the paper reached me. I still find it hard to believe that through the internet and satellite T.V. I now get stories on the Yankees and Blue Jays as quickly as residents of New York and Toronto.

As an aside you mention you enjoy writing on blogs. A few years ago I started writing a blog concentrated on crime fiction, Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan. The blog has given me a new outlet for writing. Unexpectedly it has allowed me to make blogger friends around the world.

This letter will make up two posts in my blog.

I hope you will continue to write essays, especially about baseball. Shirley Povich’s last column in the Washington Post was published the day after his death at 92. At 95 you have years to go as a sports writer.

Best wishes.

Bill Selnes

****

(2016) - A Letter to Roger Angell on This Old Man Begun and Finished

A Letter to Roger Angell on This Old Man Begun

During Christmas break I purchased a copy of This Old Man which contains writings of Roger Angell of the New Yorker magazine. Angell, 94 at the time of publication, made his initial contribution to the New Yorker in 1944 and became a fiction editor there in 1956 following in the footsteps of his mother, Katherine Sergeant Angell White, who had also been a fiction editor at the magazine. He is one of the most gifted writers of essays in the world. Age has not dimmed his writing skills. After reading the book I decided to write my thoughts in the form of a letter and mail it to Roger. The letter will be divided between this post and my next post.

****

Roger Angell

The New Yorker
1 World Trade Center
New York, New York
U.S.A. 10007

Dear Roger:

I enjoy exhibitions of grace. Whether on the field of play or on the printed page I love to see grace in action.

Reading your book This Old Man reminded me of the grace of your writing. The stories flow easily. They are interesting. They are unhurried.

It has been some years since I read your work. I have next to me in a bookcase four of your collections of essays on baseball. My recent reading has focused on crime fiction, especially for my blog, but there was no specific reason I drifted away from your writing. It has been good to return to reading your essays.

I have long admired your writing about sport, especially baseball, while carrying out your work as an editor of fiction at The New Yorker.

My life includes writing about sports while spending most of my time in other work. I have written a sports column for the local weekly paper, The Melfort Journal, for 38 years while practising law full time. I no longer write weekly columns but have continued to cover the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

In reading your stories about baseball in This Old Man it is clear to me that you like to have conversations with ball players, managers and coaches. I equally prefer to talk with athletes rather than just asking a couple of questions and moving on to the next person. I am finding it more difficult to have conversations. Players have come to expect no more than a leading question or two from a reporter. Most are startled by the concept of talking with a reporter.

Your essays, such as your recounting of a conversation with Earl Weaver, in which he profanely expressed disinterest in coaching high school or university baseball after being a major league baseball manager illustrates the unexpected joys that come from taking time to chat.

Occasionally I have had the chance to cover a major league game. In 1991 I was in Minneapolis and had a chance to visit with Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish, then an adviser on pitching to the Milwaukee Brewers. We were sitting in the dugout while he talked pitching. He told story after story. Suddenly I saw Rick Dempsey strapping on his catching gear and smiling at us. I expect Cal would have sat there in the dugout talking to me for the whole game if I could have stayed.

While I recognize a sports writer need not love sports I am glad that you love baseball. Most of my columns have been about football as the Riders are Saskatchewan’s professional team but it is baseball that I have loved all my life. My family has been playing baseball in Saskatchewan for almost 100 years.

Until I was an adult it was never baseball. I played hardball as a boy. I still like using hardball better than baseball to describe the game.

It is the grace in baseball that draws me to the game rather than the overpowering fastball or the homerun. Watching a pitcher changing speeds, locations and pitches is an artistry I look forward to every summer. Fielders smoothly handling ground balls never lose its allure. I admire the easy swings of the best hitters.

As I approach 64 I still play some baseball in Saskatchewan’s Twilite Provincial Tournaments. Many of the players are now a generation younger than me as you can be a Twiliter upon reaching 35. While grace now eludes me on the field guile can still get me, the slowest pitcher in the province, through some innings on the mound.

(Finished in my next post.)

Update on 9th Canadian Book Challenge

On a quiet Saskatchewan March evening with winter starting to wind down I am taking a look at my progress in the 9th Canadian Book Challenge which runs from July 1 to June 30 with the reader striving to read 13 Canadian authored books for the 10 Canadian provinces and 3 territories. The Challenge is hosted at the fine Book Mine Set blog of John Mutford. It happens that I have now read 9 books for the 9th Challenge.

They are:

     1.) No Known Grave by Maureen Jennings;

     2.) Plague by C.C. Humphreys;

     3.) Booked for Trouble by Eva Gates;

     4.) Another Margaret by Janice MacDonald;

     5.) The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley;

     6.) The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny - Part I and Part II;

     7.) Tropéano’s Gun by John Brooke;

     8.) The Women of Skawa Island by Anthony Bidulka; and,

     9.) The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe.

I have 5 more Canadian books already lined up for reading:

     1.) The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley;

     2.) A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley;

     3.) The Heart of Hell by Alen Mattich;

     4.) The Scottish Banker of Surabaya by Ian Hamilton; and,

     5.) The Wail of the Wendigo by Steve Pitt (An Early Adventure
     of Pierre Trudeau).

There is a 6th I will be reading for the Challenge which is the book I am most anxious to read. It is What's Left Behind by Gail Bowen which was just released on Monday. It will be the 16th Joanne Kilbourn mystery. I will buy a copy on my next trip to a city with a bookstore. 

Of the books already read my favourite new character is 11 year old Flavia de Luce in the series by Alan Bradley. I will have read 3 of the books in the series during the current Challenge. I am reading them both for pleasure and to give me information for the article I am writing on Saskatchewan mysteries for the third volume of The Saskatchewan Literary History.

I try not to forecast the future but I am optimistic I will complete the 9th Canadian Book Challenge.

The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe

The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe – Hazel Micallef is back. With the centralization process proceeding Hazel is no longer in charge of the Port Dundas detachment of the OPS. Now 64 she is a senior officer in the detachment.

The opening of the book is back in 1957 in Port Dundas. Hazel is 14 and helping out in the family store. She is an average young teenager with a real conscience. When a 17 year old girl, Carol Lim, goes missing Hazel insists to her friend, Gloria, that they must tell parents and police of their brief contact with Carol on the day she disappeared even though it means admitting they were smoking.

Fifty years later Hazel is doing her best to stem the decline of her 90 year old mother, Emily. The feisty former mayor has little spark left sleeping 16 hours a day and indifferent to everything but T.V. crime shows. Hazel desperately wants more time with her Mom.

Just south of town a golf themed residential development, Tournament Acres, is faltering. Work has stopped on one golf course. No one is sure it will be get built let alone the second course. Some of the new houses are incomplete. Plans have been announced to alter the development. The early purchasers are furious.

I was glad to see 3 maps at the start of the book showing where the plot is taking place. I can follow a story more easily when I have the visual aid of a map.

A human bone is found at the development by a resident. During a second subsequent sweep by 18 officers more bones are found. There is speculation they are connected with the massive former orphanage standing on a corner of the development.

Hazel’s younger brother, Alan, had spent 10 years at the orphanage before he was adopted by her family. Alan is considered slow in the language of the day. He struggled into adulthood.

With the sweep not yet completed the police are ready to wind down for the night when the plot explodes with an officer being kidnapped, shots fired at Hazel and a couple who are newcomers stabbed to death.

At home Hazel is lost about what to do about Emily. One moment her mother has retreated fifty years into the past. The next she is fully in the present.

They visit a specialist in aging:

By the time Emily was welcomed into the doctor’s office, all the fight had gone out of her. Sooner or later in your life, you have to put yourself in someone else’s hands. Just surrender. Hazel watched her mother being walked away. A small figure following a white coat down a hallway.

 

The investigation into the bones and the kidnapped officer proceed. At the same time there are flashbacks to what happened in 1957.

Hazel is determined to look back into life and death at the orphanage.

I found the book a choppy read. There were three stories intertwined and one of them did not fit well. There are too many issues for one book unless it was going to be at least 800 pages so the stories were not as developed as I would have liked.

The ending did bring all the plot lines together and there was plausible evil in this book.

It was interesting to read of Hazel at 14. She was an earnest girl.

I was surprised that there was not the intensity of investigation into a kidnapped police officer that I would expect.

The topics covered in the book do not lend themselves to sparkle but the story was unrelenting grim both in the past and the present. I find it harder to be engaged by a book that is all dark. It is difficult to find any light in Hazel’s life.

It is a better book than A Door in the River but that is not much praise. I am glad Hazel has returned to the competent professional officer she was in the first two books of the series. I wish she had some happiness in her life.

****

Wolfe, Inger Ash (Pseudonymn of Michael Redhill) – (2009) - The Calling; (2011) - Who is Inger Ash Wolfe? (2012) - The Taken; (2012) - Being Affected by a Male Author Creating a Female Sleuth; (2012) - Q & A with Michael Redhill on his Pseudonym Inger Ash Wolfe; (2014) - A Door in the River and Other Reviews of A Door in the River and Email Exchange with Michael Redhill on A Door in the River (Part I)

The New Night Manager T.V. Series

Last night Sharon and I had a chance to watch the first episode of the current adaptation of The Night Manager by John le Carré being broadcast on the BBC. Ordinarily if I was going to write about a mini-series I would wait until it was complete but I decided to write about the opening episode to close out my two weeks of posts involving John Le Carré.

I was impressed by the first episode. It caught and held my attention.

From the moment Tom Hiddleston appeared on the screen he met my mental image of Jonathan Pine from the book. Hiddleston is tall enough, weathered enough, lean enough, handsome enough.

I thought it very clever to move the opening scenes in Cairo from the early 1990’s to the 2011 Arab Spring Revolution and the protests wracking Cairo. Indeed, it gave a clearer reason for Dickie Roper to be selling arms in Egypt. They could be used against the protesters.

I thought Aure Atika was convincingly sultry for Freddie Hamid’s older mistress, Sophie Alekan. Her secrets betrayed by Pine she forgave him but he could not forgive himself.

As in the book word of the proposed arms deal was leaked in London to Roper by one of the traditional British Intelligence agencies.

In the book the small new intelligence agency seeking to take down Roper was headed by Leonard Burr. In the series it is run by a woman, Angela Burr, played by Oliva Colman. It was interesting to see the shift in leadership a generation after the book was written. I saw no problems with the change in gender. In characterization I thought Colman looked properly rumpled. The Burr of the book is hardly a fashionable man.

The T.V. confrontation between Pine and Sebastian Ogilvy in which Ogilvy denigrates Sophie and dismisses any obligation of the British government towards her was more effective than the book as we saw the emotions playing out in Pine.

As the story moves to Switzerland setting the luxury hotel in Zermatt rather than Zurich was immaterial to me. In both locations the rich are carefully pampered.

Hugh Laurie as Richard “Dickie” Onslow Roper appropriately swept into the hotel with his entourage. He did not precisely fit my mental view of Roper. From the book I had envisaged Roper as a bigger, more robust man, with a booming voice.

I did take me a few minutes to move away from remembering Laurie as Dr. House. Thankfully in the role of Roper he does not use a cane.

In watching the episode I did accept Laurie as Roper. Laurie is clearly in command. He has the touch of world weariness I remember from the book. He does well at playing Roper’s role as a philanthropist while dealing in arms. He is equally of the right age.

The age difference between Roper and his girlfriend, Jeds Marshall, hits more strongly when you see them side by side rather than reading about them.

Elizabeth Debicki as Jeds is suitably lanky, lovely and languid. For some reason I imagined her as a brunette with hair flowing down her back. Jed’s short blonde hairdo works well on Debicki. At 6’ 2 1/4” she has the height I expected from the book.

What is most impressive about the casting is that the “bad” guys are average to good looking rather than bad by appearance alone.

I thought the script well written. The characters have distinct voices and speak intelligently. I was not surprised that le Carré was involved with David Farr in the writing of the series.

You can see developing through the first episode Pine’s commitment to doing right and his desire to stop Roper, called the “worst man in the world”, by Sophie. He will be an easy recruitment by British Intelligence in the next episode.

Most interesting to me was that le Carré’s sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell are executive producers of the production.

My Australian blogging friend, Bernadette at her fine blog Reactions to Reading, occasionally compares a book with its adaption on screen. It is not always clear which is the better.

I am greatly looking forward to the rest of the mini-series. I have found the changes from the book to be well done and I am excited to see what further changes are ahead. If the remaining episodes are as good as the first it is going to be a great mini-series and be very profitable even though it is the most expensive mini-series in BBC history.

****

Le Carré, John – (2000) - Single & Single; (2001) - The Constant Gardner (Second best fiction of 2001); (2005) - Absolute Friends (Best fiction in 2005); (2008) - Mission Song; (2009) – A Most Wanted Man; (2016) - A Quartet of John Le Carré; (2016) - The Night Manager and The Writing of and Reaction to The Night Manager

Sisman, Adam - (2016) - John Le Carré and John Le Carré as Real Life Spy 

The Writing of and Reaction to The Night Manager

While reading The Night Manager by John Le Carré and then writing my review I avoided reading the section of the biography by Adam Sisman that dealt with The Night Manager. When I was done I went back to learn about how the book was written and received in 1993.

In his research on the international arms trade of that time he looked to the most famous writer on the subject, Anthony Sampson, whose book, The Arms Bazaar, raised world consciousness of the merchants of death.

Le Carré’s dedication to his craft is illustrated by the opening sentence of the book. He drafted 16 different versions before settling on:

On a snow-swept January evening of 1991, Jonathan Pine, the English night manager of the Hotel Meister in Zurich, forsook his office behind the reception desk and, in the grip of feelings he had not known before, took up his position in the lobby as a prelude to extending his hotel’s welcome to a distinguished late arrival.

As with most authors Le Carré has drawn upon his own life in his characters. In The Night Manager the roles of women in the life of his hero, Jonathan Pine, are essentially the same as Le Carré’s experience as recounted by Sisman who includes short quotes from The Night Manager:

Like David, Pine has undergone ‘a locked-up childhood’, one devoid of women: ‘the friends and sisters of his youth he had never had, the mother he had never known, the woman he should never have married, and the woman he should have loved and not betrayed’.

There was great anticipation of the book especially in the United States where Le Carré’s previous three books had all been No. 1 bestsellers. Le Carré was paid a $5,000,000 advance for the American rights to The Night Manager.

It turned out to be a disappointment for the publisher reaching only No. 3 on the bestseller lists. Only for an author with the great successes of Le Carré could No. 3 be unsatisfactory. There were sales of over 350,000 hardcover copies and 1,000,000 paperback copies.  The unhappiness for the publisher was that, despite the immense sales, the book lost money. The advance had been too large.

In Great Britain The Night Manager was briefly No. 1 before being overtaken by Jeffery Archer’s book, Honour Among Thieves. Still 600,000 paperback copies were sold in 3 months.

The rankings in America and Great Britain reflect my conclusion about the book. It was a very good but not great book.

Every critic noted that Le Carré had made a foray into the new world of intelligence with the end of the Cold War.

Some critics, especially in England, disliked the love story of Jeds and Pine. One described her as a fantasy woman. I am puzzled by their reaction. What self-respecting major international arms dealer would not have as his girlfriend a beautiful young woman of limited intellectual achievements? The superrich can afford fantasy.

I was not upset with the relationship of Jeds and Pine. It just was not an important part of the story for me. I did not even mention their relationship in my review. As a reader I was focused on Pine’s efforts to spy on Dickie Roper and the huge arms deal. In retrospect, what I find most interesting about the love affair is that they did not immediately begin a sexual relationship. Even 23 years ago that would have been expected in the average thriller.

With regard to critics Sisman quotes from David Remick, in the New York Review of Books:

At moments The Night Manager seemed to Remick like a James Bond novel written by a superior Ian Fleming, ‘a Goldfinger for grownups’.

I consider Remick’s comment a cheap shot. Beyond having a wealthy businessman as the bad guy The Night Manager has no relation to Goldfinger. It is a sophisticated and complex story.

The New York Times thought the book brilliant with a flawed ending.

There was one old spy who loved the book. Former American President, George H.W. Bush, wrote a letter to Le Carré:

I just wanted you to know the pleasure you have given this retired Prez, the retired CIA guy’.

****

 Le Carré, John – (2000) - Single & Single; (2001) - The Constant Gardner (Second best fiction of 2001); (2005) - Absolute Friends (Best fiction in 2005); (2008) - Mission Song; (2009) – A Most Wanted Man; (2016) - A Quartet of John Le Carré; (2016) - The Night Manager

Sisman, Adam - (2016) - John Le Carré  and John Le Carré as Real Life Spy

The Night Manager by John Le Carré

The Night Manager by John Le Carré – While reading the biography of Le Carré I realized it had been several years since I had read any of his books. In the biography each of his 23 books is discussed in some detail. Wanting to both read one of his books I had not read and see how my reaction compared to the reviews when it was published I avoided reading in the biography about The Night Manager which had been sitting on a shelf above my computer for some years. My next post will look at how Le Carré wrote the book and reaction to the book. To achieve my goals for these posts they will, contrary to my custom, have multiple spoilers. 

Upon starting the book I was immediately struck by Le Carré’s vivid and detailed descriptions of locations. I had not appreciated before reading the biography how he traveled to the places about which he was writing to experience them in a detail not possible by photographs, videos and words. Unlike most of his books The Night Manager is mainly set in the Caribbean, Central and South America. 

As always Le Carré has a compelling main character. Few authors can draw that character in but one paragraph:

Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country’s many postcolonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolf-child with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception, smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel’s revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.

He is working at the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich one of the elite hotels of the world. As night manager he is the unobtrusive figure in charge during the quiet dark hours. He is suave and capable.

Previously he had worked in hotel administration in Cairo where he had been entrusted with an envelope of secret information on weapons for sale by Sophie, the older beautiful mistress of an Egyptian playboy. Jonathan betrays her by sharing the information, which could affect regional stability, with a British intelligence officer. Sophie is killed and Jonathan left with a punishing guilt.

Into the Hotel Meiser sweeps Richard “Dickie” Onslow Roper and his entourage including the young and beautiful Jeds.

Roper was the international arms dealer behind the arms deal that resulted in Sophie’s death. Based in the Bahamas he roams the world making deals but his role, obscured by so many levels of intermediaries, can never be proven.

While his façade is unruffled Jonathan is driven by seeing Roper to contact a different of British intelligence. He is recruited to undertake a penetration of Roper’s operations.

An elaborate background is created and lived by Jonathan. It includes time in Cornwall. After learning from the biography that the Cornish coast has been Le Carre’s home for decades I understand why the portrayal of life in Cornwall was so convincing.

At the proper moment a spectacular entry is created for Jonathan.

Written in 1993 the Cold War has recently ended. Roper is no longer involved in selling weapons to the many groups around the world willing to take up arms in support of the global ambitions of America or the U.S.S.R.

With the flexibility of the amoral Roper has turned his attentions to making a massive deal that would supply modern weaponry to the drug cartels of Colombia. In return, payment will be made in cocaine.

Yet there is disharmony within the intelligence agencies of America and Britain over the covert operation. Their intrigues are a constant unknown backdrop to Jonathan’s efforts.

It is a thriller that is unashamedly complex.  It is less opaque than some of Le Carré’s plots. What stands out is how rare it is to have a contemporary thriller that challenges a reader.

As with some  of Le Carré’s books the book drags through the middle and could have been shortened. Once the threads start coming together the pace accelerates, even pounding to the conclusion.

The Night Manager differs from current thrillers in that it has complex, even likeable at times, bad guys

The ending is as close as Le Carré gets to Hollywood but he cannot go all the way. The bad guys do not get their just desserts but there is no aching end for the hero. His survival was quite a surprise to me. I was dreading another bleak Le Carré conclusion. I admit I was glad as did not want Jonathan killed. It also reflects my concern for the character ahead of the success of evil. It was a very good but not great book. I am off to see how it was created and received.

**** 

Le Carré, John – (2000) - Single & Single; (2001) - The Constant Gardner (Second best fiction of 2001); (2005) - Absolute Friends (Best fiction in 2005); (2008) - Mission Song; (2009) – A Most Wanted Man; (2016) - A Quartet of John Le Carré

Sisman, Adam - (2016) - John Le Carré  and John Le Carré as Real Life Spy