John le Carre: Absolute Friends

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON


Returning to the world of espionage and some of his favourite themes, such as social alienation, conflicted relationships between fathers and sons, and deceit, le Carre has produced a novel that is more saga than simple spy thriller.

Absolute Friends is an historical odyssey that stretches from Pakistan on the eve of its separation from India, through the European student protests of the 1960s, right up, like a ticking clock, to the unipolar world of today, complete with terrorists, 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq which, as le Carre writes, is already becoming bogged down.

This is a masterful exploration of character, and of a relationship between two men that endures, although sporadically, through more than 30 years.

Le Carre has often spoken in interviews of his own childhood, abandoned by his mother, the son of a conman who scrabbled together money to send his son to snobbish "proper" British public schools, and his struggle to learn his way among the gentry - "clandestine survival", as he puts it.

He mines those experiences for Ted Mundy, the primary character in Absolute Friends, whose mother dies giving birth to him and whose father is a drunken British major who stays on in Pakistan after the partition until he is forced, ignominiously, to flee. Father and son return to an England that, for the son in particular, is a foreign country in which he struggles and initially fails to feel at home.

Like le Carre himself, he finds a refuge in languages, in particular German, and his "real" life begins when he spends a year studying in West Berlin, squats with some radical students and meets Sasha, a left-wing ideologue largely motivated by hate for his father who he believes abandoned Lenin for the free market.

Sasha remains a shadowy figure who comes dramatically into focus at certain moments, but always only as observed or heard by Mundy. Thus we are never quite sure about him, and we fear that, yet again, Mundy has let his great need for human affection and connection cloud his judgment. That said, Mundy has his chances in love and marriage, but le Carre seems to want to show that the lies and secrecy of the intelligence world crush the life out of loving, trusting relationships.

This is an extraordinarily passionate novel: it's bitter about human self-deception and hypocrisy, heart-rending about loneliness, excoriating in its denunciation of the war in Iraq and the multiple deceptions governments and corporations practise on people.

Love, hate; rebellion, conformity; truth, lies; communism, fascism ("Nazis in red shirts" as he has Sasha describe the East German state apparatchiks); terror and the capitalism of liberal democracies - in le Carre's world such contradictions co-exist in complicated double-helixes of plot and subtext.

A little preachy and long-winded as he moves into the here-and-now, this is nevertheless among the most easily digestible of his novels.

Mundy and his lonely, self-sacrificing inner core, his plummy quick-wittedness and good nature will reverberate in your imagination long after you've closed the covers on him.

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Price: $54.99