208 of 230 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
George Smiley turns in his grave, September 26, 2010
Two or three summers ago a top British politician called Peter Mandelson (PM) was spotted on a luxury yacht owned by a Russian aluminium tycoon called Oleg Deripaska and PM was not the only British notable on board.
JLC's 22nd novel is a brilliantly-plotted, -researched and -written novel about love, honour and betrayal.
OKT is primarily an assault on Britain's ruling strata. And only secondly about the Kremlin's campaign to control Russian organized crime much as they subdued the oligarchs a decade earlier: "Share with us, or else!" The oligarchs complied, fled abroad or were jailed. Dealing with Russia's crime syndicates is harder. They are age-old brotherhoods of "honourable criminals" ("vory") living by strict codes whereby talking to, let alone dealing with the State is a sin punishable by death. But in this novel this Russian version of "omertá" is breached somewhere, somehow: Russia's seven richest and best-organized crime syndicates make a deal with the Kremlin. But there is one major obstacle.
His name is Dima, which is short for Dimitri, an honourable criminal since the age of 14, who survived 15 years in ice-cold Kolyma, and has since worked his way up to become the world's best money launderer on behalf of himself and the Seven Brotherhoods. Now he is doomed because he knows too much and is not willing to sell out, deal with the State. He is a blunt, bearlike, forceful, emotional and desperate Russian with only days or weeks to live once he has signed over his private business empire to the Seven Brotherhoods ánd disclosed where he has hedden theirtens of billions of loot, when the book starts.
From his bolt hole on the island of Antigua Dima makes a last-ditch effort to save at least his family by challenging young Oxford lecturer Peregrine ("Perry") Makepiece to a game of tennis. Perry and his lawyer girlfriend Gail fall prey to the charms of Dima and his mournful extended family. Perry pens down what Dima tells him about his life and works, because he wants a deal with the British government to save his family in exchange for a full account of his awesome whitewashing career, hoping Perry is a British spy or knows one. Perry's 28-page account, when he and Gail return home, does reach British intelligence. But...
I hope this rich book is not JLC's parting shot at writing, because OKT is in my humble opinion his best. The context and descriptions are like watching a film, the characters and dialogues are great and the moral implications of this tale go beyond anything JLC has written before.
OKT is a square assault on corruption and rent-seeking behaviour by key members of Britain's establishment in government, parliament, the press, and esp. the sacred square mile of the City, where blood money of many types and provenances is banked, invested, transferred at lightning speed to fresher pastures and back again, for no purpose or wider benefit to wider humanity. The Square Mile and its many paid advocates welcome the establishment of the banking arm of the Arena Conglomerate of the Seven Brotherhoods warmly, with its promise of bringing hundreds of billions to London and of plentiful investments in moribund industries in a near-bankrupt country.
Very rich and deep book. True masterpiece.
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140 of 158 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Many English are spy. Lords. Gentlemen. Intellectual., October 11, 2010
John le Carre is one of those authors that everybody tells me I should read, and whom I really want to read. But his towering body of work is... a little intimidating.
So I decided to start with "Our Kind of Traitor," his latest thriller. And it's a solid place to start -- new characters that don't require previous books to understand, heart-pounding suspense, and a genteel British gloss. It's an intelligent and gripping story, but at times le Carre seems to just lose his enthusiasm..
Young Oxford don Perry and his lawyer girlfriend Gail are on vacation in Antigua when they encounter Dima, a Russian millionaire with a large, grim family, a hearty love of the English, and a lavish hand with money. It turns out that he's a professional money-launderer in trouble with a mobster called The Prince. He's willing to spill everything he knows, as long as he and his family are kept safe.
Enter Hector Meredith, an aging spy who runs his own little sub-agency, and who is Dima's best chance of not getting killed. But Perry and Gail "have wandered by sheer accident into a richly planted minefield," and under Hector's guidance they soon find themselves whisked on an international adventure...
"Our Kind of Traitor" is a brilliant novel that's been hobbled. The first few chapters are mostly told in flashback, which saps some of the tension from the story. And the last few chapters feel as if John le Carre got tired of the story he was telling, so he slapped together an ending and pasted it on the end.
So as you can guess, the best part is the middle. Le Carre's prose is smooth, genteel and distinctly British, but fractured with some gritty looks at the underbelly of civilization. The cynicism is heaped high everywhere, whether it's contemptuous looks at the British government, the corrupt banking world, or the bleak, cutthroat world of Russian mobsters.
And le Carre does a pretty good job with the characters, who all feel realistic, flawed and sympathetic. Perry and Gail are a pampered, slightly self-righteous British couple who end up waaaaayyyyy in over their heads. Hector is a tweedy, outspoken old spy, while Dima is a sort of Russian Tony Soprano, whose genial exterior hides his fear and rage.
"Our Kind of Traitor" is a smooth, rich thriller with its ankles shackled -- great writing, rich characters, but it suffers from a limp beginning and a slapdash ending.
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83 of 100 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's about money laundering -- but it just might be his scariest novel ever, October 12, 2010
This review is from: Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel (Hardcover)
You can read John le Carré as the author of spy thrillers --- not just today's gold standard, but the best there ever was --- and enjoy his books as escapist fiction.
Or you can read them --- the last few, in any event --- as slightly fictionalized but absolutely authoritative news stories you won't read anywhere else because traditional media sources don't dare to report the truth or are part of an elite conspiracy to keep us from getting the truth.
How should you read him?
As it happens, le Carré gives us --- well, he gives reviewers like me --- a little help. Inside copies of his new book he includes a reprint of a December 13, 2009 piece from The Guardian. The headline: "Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor." The subhead: "Drugs and crime chief says $352 billion in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions."
The inescapable conclusion: Our most respected bankers will take money from anyone --- even drug lords --- in order to prop up their failing institutions.
Translation: The fix is in.
But I don't want to spoil "Our Kind of Traitor" for you. Forget I've told you even this much. You can't? Trust me. You will. Once you start caring about the people, the last thing on your mind will be How It Ends.
Anyway, there's no mention of money laundering in the beginning. Peregrine Makepiece --- literally: a foreigner who makes peace --- is vacationing on Antigua with Gail Perkins, his extremely attractive live-in girlfriend. Perry was, until recently, a tutor in English Literature at Oxford; Gail is a barrister with a future. She's satisfied with the trajectory of her career; he's so turned off by academia he wants to teach secondary school in some deprived English slum.
Perry plays a wickedly good game of tennis. The pro introduces him to Dima, "a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties." Dima and Perry play three brisk sets. An invitation to a party follows. There, Perry and Gail note the presence of an entourage --- and bodyguards.
Dima is fond of the young couple --- or is it that the guy who describes himself "the world's number one money launderer" is just very good at sizing people up? Because Dima deputizes Gail and Perry. That is, he hands them this note:
"Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, the one they call Dima, European director of Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, is willing negotiate through intermediary Professor Perry Makepiece and lawyer Madam Gail Perkins mutually profitable arrangement with authority of Great Britain regarding permanent residence all family in exchange for certain informations very important, very urgent, very critical for Great Britain of Her Majesty."
In theory, this should be easy. Dima has information. He wants asylum. It's not like getting him across borders will be a problem --- this is 2009, not 1955.
Now we hear the story again. Perry's version. Gail's. As told to middle-level English spymasters in London. Who, likewise, deputize Perry and Gail --- as short-term spies.
Unlikely? For you and me, perhaps. But Gail and Perry have their reasons, and le Carré drops them along the pathway of the novel like bread crumbs. So they're off. To a meeting with Dima in Paris at the French Open. And an even more exciting meeting --- by now, we understand that Dima believes his Russians colleagues are watching him --- that is diabolical in its layers of deception.
The clock ticks. The anxiety mounts. What's the hitch? Well, perhaps Dima is a bit too... big for easy assimilation. His information might...lead somewhere. And we can't have that.
Here's how it works, an English spymaster explains: "Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap's laundering a couple of million? He's a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you're talking. Billions are a statistic."
Getting the idea? At the top, they --- the snooty bankers in London, Russian crooks, the Russian government, and Lord knows who else --- are all connected. Black money turns white.
Do you care how that happens? That it happens? How could you? You don't know about it. And, if told, you won't believe it.
Spies used to operate on the margins, at checkpoints, in lonely towns with names you can't pronounce. Then they were soldiers in the Cold War. Now, le Carré tells us, they exist for much darker purposes.
Of all of le Carré's novels, this is the one that makes me feel like a child. I mean, I know we're all under surveillance now. Photographed often. Every keystroke, every e-mail, every Tweet saved --- illegally, but saved. At any moment, the President can declare an American citizen an enemy combatant, a threat to the security of the Republic, and without judicial review or formal charge, he can order that American to be killed. But although I know all that, I hadn't quite realized that when large amounts of money are involved, none of the old words --- honor, truth, empathy --- matter at all.
What le Carré is telling us here is that there is something that might be called the country of money. It has no boundaries. There are no "sides." The government of Russia has made a pact with the Russian Mafia --- or is it the other way around? --- so criminal fortunes are appropriately shared. (When things go wrong, blame the Chechens.) And the cash-starved West? Our bankers? Our CEOs? Our statesmen? Bought. All of them.
How good is John le Carré? Good enough to make you care about Dima, Perry and Gail --- and the people they care about. Good enough to make you angry at their difficulties. Good enough to surprise you --- no matter how cynical you are --- at the end. In short, the best.
Read it and weep.
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