Customer Reviews

The Night Manager

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Mr le Carre seems to blow hot and cold, one good book, one pot boiler. The Night Manager definitely falls into the former category. Jonathan Pine is the manager of a hotel in Switzerland, formal, correct, impeccable. But, like all le Carre's characters his placid exterior hides a multitude of depths. His mission is to bring down the "worst man in the world." Roper, the millionaire, gun runner, invulnerable friend of government ministers, philanthropist, doting father. Pine must infiltrate, seduce, outwit and destroy the empire that Roper has built. The tension is maintained perfectly and the everyday manner in which the characters go about their deadly business makes the book all the more riveting. If the final denouement is slightly disappointing, as if perhaps the author found himself in a cul de sac with no way out, overall, the story holds together wonderfully. And let's face it, at least he didn't finish with, "And then Jonathan woke up."

Jonathan Pine, sometime hotelier, soldier, killer, lover and agent, is swept up in a complex international intrigue. Weapons for sale is the pivot around which money, power and even romance impinge on Jonathan's life. The many roles, varied and useful as they are, leave him with no particular purpose in life. Until he encounters "the worst man in the world". The prompt is Sophie, who might have been a lover, but who belongs to Freddie Hamid. Freddie is aligned with Richard Onslow Roper, of Nassau, the Bahamas. The name and location are almost a slap in the face, since the Caribbean island-nations are host to shady firms. Little or no taxes and even less government supervision make it possible for the unscrupulous to engage in many forms of chicanery. Drugs and weapons loom large in that realm.

Left at loose ends by the fall of the Soviet Union, British Intelligence services need a fresh cause. If nothing else, all those bureaucratic structures and their personnel need to turn their expertise to new tasks. The problem is that the Cold War enabled influential people to develop links through the various spy networks. How many wealthy aristocrats are now involved in picking up the pieces to further enrich themselves? And which ones are doing so? Pine, picked up by one of the new spin-off intelligence organisations is set to learn answers to these questions. A faked murder sends him to unreachable places with a new identity. It puts him in a position to penetrate the Roper organisation. Throughout this tale, Pine is driven by the ghost of Sophie, who was found beaten to death in Egypt. Even in the backwoods of Quebec, hiding from authorities and maneuvering to complete his mission, he is beset by the image of her in his mind.

LeCarre's style is well applied in this tale of international wheeling and dealing. He exhibits a well-versed familiarity with the places described. It's his characters, however, that give this story its richness. From the intelligence bureaucrats through the "heavies" Roper employs as his protectors and fronts, to Pine and the women his life touches, there are no false images conveyed. The author portrays them effectively and consistently with no distracting or invalid diversions. Which is not to imply any of them are shallow or above credibility. Although the conclusion is unexpected, especially given the circumstances, the "spy novel" author has brought a new facet to intelligence writing. It's a captivating book and well worth either the established LeCarre fan or someone taking him up for the first time to have in their collection. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is eerily familiar to anyone who knows the businesses of private banking, international arms dealing and covert export licensing by governments. Originally recommended to me by a senior security source in an international bank, this was one of those rare and riveting occasions when a fictional account of a subject grew more and more recognisable on closer reading. A military intelligence researcher recently confirmed this view, telling me that "if this had been written as a textbook, Her Majesty's Government would have tried to ban it". For each fictional character there is a real counterpart out there; certainly for anyone who knows anything about the real post-Cold War agenda for western governments there is some jarringly accurate analysis of motive, mechanism and personality politics. Whether you read this as simply a thunderingly good story to rank with Le Carre's best, or as a "roman a clef" which reveals the real personalities behind British political administration, it is un-put-downable. (Fun game for parties of international bankers/arms dealers: How many real-world characters can you identify?) I now issue this as a textbook to employees embarking on careers in banking, as a morality tale about the perils of money laundering. Others should simply enjoy, and wonder how much is true!

I consider myself a John le Carre aficionado, and this is, hands down, my favorite thus far.

We anticipate that his espionage and political threads are strong and tightly drawn. However, what is the true joy of this novel is the emotional depth of le Carre's hero, Jonathan. Driven by retribution and revenge, we get a man (as opposed to an automaton) with heart and soul as well as the obligatory skills of a spy.

In THE NIGHT MANAGER, le Carre's prose is poetry, as exemplified when Jonathan, caught in an act of espionage, makes love to the anti-heroine (whom he covets, but thus far has never touched) by telling her: "I'm obsessed by you. I can't get you out of my head. I don't mean I'm in love with you. I sleep with you, I wake up with you, I can't clean my teeth without cleaning yours as well and most of the time I'm quarreling with you. There's no logic to it, there's no pleasure to it. I haven't heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge. Yet every time I think of something funny, I need you to laugh at it, and when I'm low it's you I need to cheer me up. I don't know who you are, if you're anyone at all. Or whether you're here for the beer or because you're wildly in love with Roper. And I'm sure you don't know either. I think you're a total mess. but that doesn't put me off. Not at all. It makes me indignant, it makes me a fool it makes me want to wring your neck. But that's just part of the package."

Trust me, it works. And if you don't get it, then seriously, you just don't get le Carre.

Let's face it. John's works (or should I say David's?)is not for everyone. Other reviewers suggested a pot of coffee to get through a chapter. Yes, if your particular area of interest in books lies with action-follow-action-follow-some-more-action-and-for-a-change-a-little-action, then JLC is not your writer. And if you're trying to get into JLC, for god's sake, don't start with The Perfect Spy. Almost made me quit. But Our Game, Night Manager, Russia House and Tailor of Panama are the top of his line and are to be enjoyed to the max...if you happen to like his slow but thorough character development. There is the old saying from Hitchcock that a movie is "life, with the boring parts cut out". John's art is in putting in the boring parts and making them sound interesting and the least bit exciting. I, for one, have fallen in love with Jed, got to know Dicky so well (can you see Roger Moore?), and leared to relate to Pine in so many ways, it's emberassing. I'm a writer myself, and if I maybe so bold, The Night Manager is my bible. Read it if you are taken aback by the fast-paced story lines of Clancy and his clones. Spying is waiting. Spying is taking in life, gruesome inch by gruesome inch, seeing characers rise and fall and be tossed half-dead into boats while evil sails on. Spying means that the only thing you will get after spending a day being a different version of yourself is love...and only maybe.

Oh, boy....see how JLC gets to you?

/Alec Corday

An earlier reviewer pretty much summed up this book for me - "...a middling good LeCarre read...". Not exactly his best but still a pretty gripping novel and remarkably undated, even post 9/11. Some of his usual themes about loyalty and betrayal are here but at least this book takes place in an England which I can recognize, not in some post-Empire never-never-land. In short, if you like your thrillers written by someone with more than a passing familiarity with style and the English language in general, don't be afraid to pick this up.

While not meaning this as an insult, it's helpful to know that _The Night Manager_ is essentially a rewrite of _The Spy Who Came In From The Cold_ -- except that the Berlin Wall is now an invisible wall made up of money, class, privilege and moral ambiguity. Johnny Pine is a man adrift -- a successful night-manager for exclusive hotels, he spends his time carefully forgetting his past in the SAS, and trying to forget how to feel.

This is probably the most Greene-like of le Carre's novels; the action is driven by Pine's need for atonement for sins we know of and sins sins he barely hints at. It's richer, more complex and better-written than its forbear, but to some extent it lacks the melancholy ring of truth that made _Spy Who..._ so effective as an antidote to the romantic spy fiction of its day. Nevertheless, le Carre does a credible job of bringing his attention to bear on new areas of conflict. Well worth looking at.

I'm shocked to see all these dismal reviews for "The night manager". I read it 4 years ago and still vividly remember the characters. I found it to be a huge, powerful work that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. One of my all-time favorites. Highly Recommended!

"The Night Manager," published in 1993, is one of the outstanding British spy expert-author John LeCarre's post cold war standalone mysteries. Like most of his novels, it boasts a fairly complex plot, a wide variety of well-written characters given his usual good dialogue, and evocative narrative and descriptive writing.

The book opens with an Englishman, Jonathan Pine, ex-army, working as night manager in Zurich's expensive, formal, most favorite hotel, the Meister Palace. (This also gives its author another chance to return to his German-speaking comfort zone.) Pine awaits the arrival of Richard Onslow Roper and his large party. Roper, a millionaire drugs/arms smuggling Englishman, has been described to Pine as "the worst man in the world," by the beautiful Madame Sophie, mistress to Arab playboy Freddie Hamid, both of whom he knew in his last job at a Cairo hotel. Pine, who'd half-fallen in love with Sophie, had agreed to help her run off copies of some incriminating documents she'd found among Hamid's papers, linking the Arab to Roper. However, while he was at it, Pine ran off a second set of copies, and sent them to an old friend in Britain's secret service. This cost Sophie her life. So Pine moves to the Zurich hotel, where he's more likely to meet Roper, and volunteers to slip into the smuggler's inner circles and spy on his activities for a fledgling British government agency. In these inner circles he will meet, and again fall in love with, Roper's current mistress, the beautiful Jemima, whom LeCarre describes as "Some upper-class geisha, convent school, rides to hounds." And we will soon realize that, in typical LeCarre style, the spy's most dangerous enemies are the territorially inclined "cousins" as the author calls the American CIA, and the squabbling Whitehall mandarins in the home country.

These squabbles, and the midnight meetings of the mandarins, unfortunately, take up much of the book, and few readers are likely to find them as engrossing as the cold war maneuvering in the author's previous work. Even fewer readers are likely to find that "the worst man in the world," can represent such a serious threat to the world as the author would have us believe. LeCarre has Burr, one of his mandarins on the right side, muse: "It was not so much the tentacles of the octopus as its ability to enter the most hallowed shrines that left them aghast. It was the involvement of institutions that even Burr had till now presumed inviolate, of names above reproach." So the question is: can you dig it?

I'm a big fan of JLC and have read most of his books. In Night Manager, he again shows his mastery of characterization, time & place, descriptive detail, suspense and story telling; to me only Graham Greene and Charles McCarry are comparable (or better, depending upon what you read) in skill. However, the ending felt like he painted himself into a corner and/or was pushed by someone to finish the novel, because it was just unbelievable that he could have finished the book in the way he did. There were at least a couple of other endings he could have chosen than the one he did, and ones that would have been more satisfying for the reader. Also, I kept waiting for the relevance of the drawn-out description of the Canada visit to appear, but it never did. True, every word written for that scene was masterly and left me wishing I were Jonathan, but at the end of the story it made me feel like much of what was written was somehow filler to make more of the book (in size) than it had to be. At least I learned a little more about writing in reading how a master failed to pull off a final triumph, for whatever reason (possibly external).