- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Viking Books (12 Oct 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670022241
- ISBN-13: 978-0670022243
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 16 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (127 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,676,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Our Kind of Traitor
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Our Kind of Traitor is a reminder – if such a thing were needed – that John le Carré 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 Carré 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 Carré 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 bête noir of the author) and the big pharmaceutical companies, le Carré 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 Carré 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 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not vintage - but still on good form,
By
This review is from: Our Kind of Traitor (Hardcover)
With Le Carré, you don't get mad action. You get people. This is no exception. It's certainly not his greatest work, but it's still a lot better than a lot of spy novels that are out there. Perhaps, it is ultimately a bit predictable, but as ever, you are never quite sure. And when the end comes, it comes suddenly and that can lead to some suggestions of "running out of steam", but how else could it have ended?When academic Perry and his girlfriend Gail find themselves on a tennis break in Antigua, they have no idea that their lives are going to be turned upside down when they meet a rich and somewhat scarey Russian who wants to play Perry at tennis. Soon, Perry and Gail are unwittingly involved in a bid for asylum as the Russian, Dima, has information that will be of interest to the powers that be, certainly involving the banking sector. This is Le Carré right up to date, full of talk of recession and banking meltdown. As with any good spy book, we spend time in Paris as well as Antigua, London and Switzerland, with a short jaunt to Russia thrown in for good measure. Le Carré writes beautifully (his dialogue in particular is always authentic) and creates completely believable characters all with their own little character weaknesses. And if Le Carré's best works have been in the Cold War era, you have to admire the resilience of the man to adapt his novels to more modern times. It's certainly well worth a read, providing you are not expecting vintage Le Carré.
60 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I want a proper ending,
By
This review is from: Our Kind of Traitor (Hardcover)
For a time it felt like we were back in the happy days of Tinker Tailor and I was absorbed into this novel and very happy that the author seemed about to deliver a similar experience to his Smiley novels.Then, the larger than life Dima began to be irritating and something began to wane. Even Hector - a very different kind of Smiley - began to let me down too. I accept that the author has moved on and the villains of today are not the old Cold War warriors so I may be making an unfair comparison with the past. I think that I do appreciate the author has become cynical about institutions - government, the Service,the Swiss, the City - that we once relied upon, naively perhaps. Still, I was pretty content right up to the end - or the lack of one, to be precise. Maybe the world has reached the point where no-one can win so that there cannot be an ending. Fine, but it seems that such stories are going to leave me feeling that I've rather wasted my time.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
not very good,
This review is from: Our Kind of Traitor (Hardcover)
This was very disappointing after the excellence of A Most Wanted Man. It has Le Carre's usual fluency and clever use of different registers, though in this case they are more irritating than anything else. But the plot is vanishingly thin, and the author loses interest in his characters, so that Perry and Gail become irrelevant in the last third of the book, and Le C suddenly becomes much more concerned with the spies. It is the Smiley vanishing trick in The Honourable Schoolboy all over again. We may become interested in Natasha, or even Dima, although credibility is not a conspicuous feature of this novel, but it all comes to naught when Le C decides on an apocalyptic ending (not for the first time) to save him the trouble of working out something more plausible. I really don't know why he bothered.
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