Absolute Friends - by John Le Carre - Audio Book CD
Brand New (6 CDs - 6.5 hours):
By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a British Army Officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days, when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize.
Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tours guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out fro trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served.
And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict.
After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life - this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they?
About John Le Carre
(From Wikipedia) Nearly all of his novels fall in the spy-thriller genre, with a particular emphasis on the Cold War. One notable exception is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, which has autobiographical elements based on the author's relationship with James and Susan Kennaway following the breakdown of his first marriage.
Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, closely follow the mystery fiction approach, where the emphasis is on a complex riddle that hero George Smiley must solve. In later, longer works, such as The Honourable Schoolboy and The Night Manager, Le Carré approaches his material more as novelist and less as a mystery writer, focusing on the in-depth development of his characters.
Le Carré's work is in many ways a critical and reasoned response to the lurid sensationalism of the James Bond genre of spy writing. His heroes are three-dimensional, their engagement with the world is more realistic, and their circumstances are markedly unglamorous. There is little of the action thriller in his stories, no high-tech gadgetry and only a limited degree of violence; the drama comes primarily in the intensive mental activity of his protagonists. In some novels, such as A Small Town in Germany, almost the entire story unfolds in the form of dialogue between the major characters. Le Carré is widely hailed as writing some of the most literary and philosophically significant genre fiction of the 20th century.
His works also differ from the Bond books in that they are morally complex; there are constant reminders of the fallibility of western espionage systems and western countries in general, often with the implication that the Soviet bloc and the NATO bloc are essentially two sides of the same coin. The simplicity of the good-versus-SMERSH or SPECTRE world of Ian Fleming has no place in Le Carré's work, where the spies seem to serve espionage more than any ideology. Le Carré is more interested in the uncertainty inherent in spycraft—the most unimpeachable information from the enemy might always prove to be bait or a trap, a logic that tends to render the information obtained far less useful. In short, his books leave behind an unmistakable air of scepticism.
A Perfect Spy, Le Carré's most autobiographical novel, deals with the author's peculiar relationship with his father. Lynndianne Beene, the author of a biography of le Carré, describes Richard Cornwell as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values". Beene quotes le Carré's reflection on the novel that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised".
Le Carré is also the author of The Unbearable Peace, a lengthy non-fiction account of Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. |
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