A Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

by John le Carre (Author)
Key Phrases: choirboy voice, street watchers, fucking bank, Erna Frey, Frau Richter, Frau Ellenberger (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa at the start of this morally complex thriller from le Carré (The Mission Song), they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov, a Red Army colonel whose considerable assets are concealed in a mysterious portfolio at a Hamburg bank. Tommy Brue, a stereotypical flawed everyman caught up in the machinations of spies and counterspies, enters the plot when Issa's attorney seeks to claim these assets. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le Carré effort is far above the common run of thrillers. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Not satisfied, apparently, with continuing to write his generally first-rate novels, John le Carré has now taken to reviewing them as well. On the front cover of the advance edition of A Most Wanted Man is reproduced a letter from the great man addressed to "Dear Reader": "New spies with new loyalties, old ones with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good, but caught in the moral maze; all the good, sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love, or pity, & remain good 'patriots' -- I'm pleased with the way this novel turned out. Best, John le Carré." So what, after that, is the mere reviewer to do? Were he or she to say, perhaps, that "John le Carré has written an interesting new novel about decent people wanting to do good, but trapped in moral dilemmas," readers would say that this interpretation merely parrots and paraphrases le Carré's, and they would be right. One of the reviewer's tasks, after all, is to interpret a book as well as to pass judgment on it, but in this instance, le Carré has done all our interpreting for us, and has even tacked on the judgment that he is jolly well happy about what he has written. Probably, his self-satisfied little note was written for booksellers rather than reviewers, but since it has landed in the laps of reviewers as well, it has the feeling of a pre-emptive strike. There's just one problem. Though le Carré's interpretation of his novel's themes is accurate enough, his judgment of its literary worth is considerably inflated. As one who has reviewed his work for more than three decades, always with admiration and at times with unfettered enthusiasm, I'd place A Most Wanted Man toward the lower end of the 21 novels he has now written. It is intelligent, of course, and immensely informative about espionage and the people who engage in it, but its prose occasionally is flabby (especially when the heroine is involved), the feelings its central characters have for each other are utterly unconvincing, and it ends on a note of clichéd, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that I find repellent. Now in his late 70s, le Carré perhaps has earned the right to phone a novel in, and phoned-in is what this one is. It is set in Hamburg: "Nobody was likely to forget, be he Muslim, police spy or both, that the city-state of Hamburg had been unwitting host to three of the 9/11 hijackers, not to mention their fellow cell-members and plotters; or that Mohammed Atta, who steered the first plane into the Twin Towers, had worshiped his wrathful god in a humble Hamburg mosque." A young Chechen Muslim calling himself Issa, "stateless, homeless, an ex-prisoner and illegal," shows up at the modest residence of Leyla Oktay and her son Melik, immigrants from Turkey who are in the city on temporary residency permits. They are good people, and they welcome Issa almost immediately, Leyla treating him as a son and Melik as a brother. He is referred to Sanctuary North, "a Charitable Christian Foundation for the protection of stateless and displaced persons in the Region of North Germany," and his case is taken over by Annabel Richter, a no-nonsense young lawyer there. Tough cookie she may be, but she manages to convince herself in no time flat that Issa's story is true: that he had been imprisoned and tortured in Turkey, had escaped to Denmark and from there to Germany, and had a large amount of money waiting for him at "the private banking house of Brue Frères PLC, formerly of Glasgow, Rio de Janeiro and Vienna, and presently [sic] of Hamburg," the head of which is the 60-year-old Tommy Brue, "the bank's sole surviving partner and bearer of its famous name." The money had been left to Issa by his father, a wholly corrupt Russian gangster who raped and eventually murdered the young Chechen girl who gave birth to Issa. Everyone is awash in emotions. Issa is afraid of being thrown back into prison and tortured. Tommy, trapped in an unhappy marriage to a faithless wife, finds himself falling for Annabel, who is (of course) lovely and sexy as well as smart. As for Annabel, she is on a mission: "The moment I sat down with Issa and heard his story, I knew that this was where the system stops, that this was the unsavable life I must save, that I must think of myself not as a lawyer but as a doctor like my brother Hugo and ask myself: What is my duty to this injured man, what sort of a German lawyer am I if I leave him in the legal gutter to bleed to death?" She says she's "doing this for the principle, not the man," but there comes a moment "when she felt most inclined to fall in love with him, when intimacy on such a scale became an act of stupendous generosity, and her whole being was responding to him," though "that way lay the negation of the promise she had made to herself: to put his life -- and not his love -- before law." Others take a considerably less sanguine view of Issa. Many of these are to be found in "the cramped quarters of the Foreign Acquisitions Unit of Hamburg's grandly named Office for the Protection of the Constitution -- in plain language, domestic intelligence service," especially in the offices of "The Unit," directed by Günther Bachmann, an ace intelligence operator who is trying to reform and improve German intelligence. Bachmann, who is by far the most interesting character in the novel, has this to say about Issa: "We're looking for a man who has no patronymic and no relationship with normality. His record tells us he's a militant Chechen-Russian who does violent crime and bribes his way out of Turkish jail -- and what the hell was he doing there anyway? -- gives the slip to the Swedish port police, buys himself back onto the boat he comes off, smuggles himself out of Copenhagen docks, charters himself a lorry to Hamburg, accepts a beaker of refreshment from an elderly fat bastard whom he engages in conversation in Christ knows whose language, and wears a gold Koran bracelet. Such a man deserves our considerable respect. Amen?" Thus the lines are drawn between Issa, Annabel and Tommy on one side, the intelligence operatives on the other. There is a further division within intelligence, between hard-liners who believe that "high-profile arrests will serve as a deterrent to Islamist sympathizers, and restore confidence in those responsible for seeking them out" and more nimble thinkers who reason as Bachmann does: "We are not policemen, we are spies. We do not arrest our targets. We develop them and redirect them at bigger targets. When we identify a network, we watch it, we listen to it, we penetrate it and by degrees we control it. Arrests are of negative value. They destroy a precious acquisition. They send you scrabbling back to the drawing board, looking for another network half as good as the one you've just screwed up." A good point well made, and a considerably more important one to this novel than any of the themes cited by le Carré in his letter to readers. As he writes elsewhere, "in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who's been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth." Such a "base of knowledge" is what Bachmann is trying to create within Germany's Muslim community, and what the hard-liners -- in British and American as well as German intelligence -- are vigorously resisting. How this conflict plays out is essential to the novel's conclusion. The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré -- it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene -- but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author's opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition. The CIA people who crash onto the scene at the end are mere cartoons. Le Carré, who is capable of great subtlety and nuance, here is all bludgeon and righteous anger. It is not pretty to watch, and it diminishes him.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416594884
• ISBN-13: 978-1416594888
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (150 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,765 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3 1/2 Stars...Now I Know Why, October 22, 2008

By	Eric Wilson "novelist" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Years ago, I was awestruck by the power of Le Carre's books, from "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" to "The Little Drummer Gi rl." Later, I found myself caught up in the problems of "The Night Manager." I loved the moral complexities, the character depth, and the astute dialogue.

Since then, few of his novels have held me in quite the same way. They often seem vague, floundering, with no real direction. "A Most Wanted Man" has glimpses of that old Le Carre, though never as focused or riveting as in those earlier years. This time around, we are drawn into the mystery of a young man from Chechnya who's shown up in Germany. He bears marks of imprisonment and mental instability, and yet he seems to have valuable connections in the German banking industry. He receives pity and mercy from a banker and a female lawyer, while being hunted by shadowy figures from past and present. Along the way, Le Carre makes some biting commentary on the state of affairs in the modern Western world.

As expected, we are given in-depth looks at character and setting here, as well as the emotional and political structures that rise and fall around our desire for democracy. It's an interesting story, if not a bit windy in places. It was more cohesive than some of his recent efforts, but still lacked that beating heart that seemed to pulse in his earlier books--even faintly. I kept waiting for that resuscitation to happen here, but it never quite did so. After a few books of his that have showed this same lifelessness, I wondered why.

I went to Mr. Le Carre's website the other day and found this quote from him: "nothing that I write is authentic...Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing." I strongly disagree with this statement. Most of my favorite authors connect with me through fiction because they ARE authentic. They find that center and get to the heart of the human condition, without flinching. I think Mr. Le Carre's cynicism has robbed him of his empathy and replaced it with justifiable anger and fear. Yes, his books contain those emotions, but they stopped having a beating heart last decade...and now at last I know why.

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ninety-Five Percent Good, September 4, 2008

By	Kevin Joseph (McLean, VA United States) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

John le Carre bases A Most Wanted Man on a most unlikely premise. To depict the extent of Western xenophobia and scapegoating spawned by 9/11, he chooses to set this spy novel not in the country that was struck by the terrorists, or in the nations targeted by the ensuing War on Terror, but in the country that served as a way station for several key 9/11 terrorists.

Hamburg, Germany, a city known for its openness to foreigners, is infiltrated by a fractured young man from Chechnya who may (or may not) pose the next grave threat to Western civilization. Young Issa's improbable entry into Germany, tenuous connection to Islamic radicals, and inherited right to a large secret bank account held by British-owned Brue Freres, place him in the crosshairs of German, British and United States intelligence agencies, each with its own mysterious agenda. When young civil rights attorney Annabel petitions bank owner Tommy Brue to release the secret funds and help protect Issa from deportation, Annabel and Tommy find themselves caught up in a multi-layered plot that tests their willingness to sacrifice their reputations and livelihoods for the benefit of this enigmatic young man.

A Most Wanted Man succeeds not only as a sophisticated spy thriller, but also as a nuanced character study, provocative political commentary, and thoughtful examination of what it really means to be a moral human being. The writing is fluid throughout, and the well-constructed plot builds suspense even in the absence of violent action. The ending, though, left me with the impression that le Carre wound this tale so tightly that it jammed up at the climax and could not release properly. When this gets made into a movie, as seems to be the case with most of le Carre's books, the screen writer's challenge will be to devise a more fitting resolution to this fantastic build-up.

62 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." , September 18, 2008

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

George Orwell.

With the possible exception of one young German lawyer there are no revolutionary acts in John Le Carre's "A Most Wanted Man". Rather, we have high-level functionaries from German, British, and US intelligence agencies for whom deceit is the norm and truth plays, at best, a secondary role in acting in what is or may be in each country's national interest. In tone and substance this is not much different from Le Carre's Cold War fiction. The trick is to see whether the same cynical realism plays as well in today's `war on terror'. Le Carre's transition from the Cold War to the brave new world post-9/11 is excellent. The result is a book that is dark, cynical, and almost as rewarding as the best of Le Carre's earlier fiction.

The most wanted man in question is Issa. Issa is the product of the rape of a Chechnyan woman by a Red Army Colonel stationed in Chechnya. Raised by his father in Russia, Issa flees to the west after his father dies. Issa finds his way to Hamburg and despite his famished look it appears that Issa has connection to money and influence. He is also, apparently, a Muslim and because of his Chechnyan heritage he is identified by Russian intelligence agencies as a suspected terrorist. German, US, and British intelligence agencies based in Hamburg quickly identify him as a person of interest. The other main protagonists are Annabel Richter and Tommy Brue. Richter is a newly qualified attorney who has foregone work in private practice to work for a German civil rights organization created to assist immigrants and refugees in normalizing their status in Germany. Brue is a private banker whose bank is the depository of the significant funds Issa may lay claim to.

Le Carre does a wonderful job portraying Issa, Richter, and Brue. Issa is a total cipher. He has a naïve innocence about him (think of Chance from Jerzy Kosinki's Being There) that takes the reader in one direction in assessing his motives and the real reason for his presence in Germany. Yet there are enough anomalies and discrepancies in his story and in his remarks to Richter and Brue that make you go, "hold on a moment, there's more here than meets the eye." Richter is something of a naif, her idealism tends to obscure her ability to cast a truly critical eye over the gaps in Issa's story.

Tennyson once wrote:

"That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight."

Le Carre writes with exquisite precision and insight about a world in which truth is not a matter worth fighting for. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig