#ReadThis #WhomYouKnow #ALegacyofSpies #JohnleCarre #leCarre A LEGACY OF SPIES by JOHN LE CARRÉ @lecarre_news @PenguinBooks #LondonPeachy #EnglandPeachy
What took us so long?!
If we knew sooner how much we'd like le Carre, we would have published on him ages ago.
Sharp. Detailed. Careful. Stunning. Savor every page.
Thanks to 60 Minutes, which we watch religiously secondarily to CBS Sunday morning of course, where Peachy first worked, we learned of John le Carre and finally we picked up his newest book because we loved his interview. Those are the two best shows in journalism.
If you also don't have CBS All Access, you can see the short version of le Carre reading this:
and here's the transcript:
le Carre is absolutely brilliant and by far the best author we have read this year; h
e is the one that must have been born secret.
We should have started out with him in 2009.
We read Legacy of Spies not once, but three times.
This is by no means a quick read. le Carre is highly intelligent and does not miss a trick, and obviously was an ideal spy per his capabilities in real life, translated to the written word for the last several decades. These are the most intriguing, detailed and well-woven books in this genre you can read, and we've only just begun. Everything else seems like a cheap imitation once you've opened this author's books. le Carre gives unprecedented humanity to the life of a spy and has a storyline layers deep that you will never guess.
Legacy of Spies is the third in a trilogy, and we intend on going back to the other two which perhaps we should have started with. Set in the cold war, this tells you a bit of what happened before Ronald Reagan said, "Tear Down this Wall."
A beautiful garden of surreptitious splendors, A Legacy of Spies is told by protagonist Peter Guillam, and we do mean so quite literally. From Mayflower to Tulip, scents of the underworld will enrapture you through his retelling of his past life as a spy. For everyone that loves to watch Homeland, we think you will love this.
Through the present world of what has died from the past: jolly chatter of typewriters, unanswered telephones, clapped-out file trolley ratting (p. 22), what has not died from the past comes lurching up and slapping Peter in the face via Bunny (not a rabbit, sadly) and Laura, the nasty duo of painstaking legal trouble. Despite his age, Bunny has an overly casual millenial-type manner, which is far from a compliment.
Fish are meant to be filleted, files are not. In summary, Peter must fill in the blanks to cover his back for a cause he did not scheme up and was not at fault for, but he could receive the blame. Agents, double agents, love, murder and treachery are rampant and you can't miss a beat of the action replayed or you will have to go back and re-read. Do not read this at a noisy beach, unless you have private beachfront property. Turn off your phone and computer while you read this cover to cover. Then cover to cover again. Your own over-analyzations on top of Peter's overthinking and the exercise of his memory will keep you guessing until you have figured it all out.
Throughout, le Carre shows none of his eighty-something years except for the obvious wisdom in his possession. His razor-sharp alacrity in style is highly laudable and matched by his suave sophistication of word placement and choice of verbiage. His exceptional word choice dictates he is the master of the spy novel and his complex characters deliver. le Carre knows that words mean things, and his arsenal is filled with such weapons, particularly in finer points of definitions, such as did he...her? (p. 234, bottom).
Time to join the CIRCUS and start reading Legacy of Spies!
It's a windfall of entertainment.
Legacy of Spies is Highly Recommended by Whom You Know.
Stay tuned for the le Carre hit pararde.
John le Carré was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Bern and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.
Last year, John le Carré’s A LEGACY OF SPIES was a literary sensation, landing at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and named one of the best books of 2017 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others. A LEGACY OF SPIES was the first novel in over twenty-five years to feature George Smiley, le Carré’s most famous and beloved character, and, as Kirkus Reviews put it, “the miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.” On May 1st, A LEGACY OF SPIES will be published in paperback by Penguin Books.
In A LEGACY OF SPIES, le Carré interweaves past with present so that each character may tell their own intense story, and has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.
For more than fifty years John le Carré has written novels that have come to define our age, from his extraordinary Cold War novels to his powerful depiction of the War on Terror in his novel, A Delicate Truth. He is one of only a handful of writers whose novels have been successfully adapted for the big and small screen and whose characters have been interpreted by the greatest actors of their time: in the 1960s by Richard Burton; in the 1970s by Alec Guinness; in 2005 by Ralph Fiennes; in 2014 by Philip Seymour Hoffman. In 2016, The Night Manager aired as a six-part series on AMC and became an award-winning critical hit. This fall, AMC will air the six-part TV adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl, directed by legendary filmmaker Park Chan-Wook in his television debut, which stars Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Shannon.
A LEGACY OF SPIES
John le Carré ▪ Penguin Books ▪ ISBN: 9780735225138
