Single & Single (Hardcover)

by John le Carre (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.

The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls "the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East." In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations--illegal drugs--and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, "Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally."

Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog--why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world.

Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
Le Carr? reads his new thriller with the voice of a master of the genre, gamely throwing himself into long passages of the dialogue-driven plot. He jumps right into the complex story, set in locations that shift back and forth from Turkey to England, with little set-up explanation. The sense of atmosphere is rich, the polished, descriptive scenes exquisite. However, perhaps due to the abridgment process, a listener is left playing catch-up throughout the tape, struggling to discern what's really going on with the characters. At heart, this is a story of a struggle between father and son, shadowy financier Tiger Single and children's magician Oliver Hawthorne. Tiger has deserted the family to consort with Russian mobsters, and Oliver, having betrayed his father once, now must fight to save his life. They're joined by a complex financial thread that provides the central framework for the international intrigue propelling the action. As audio, the listening experience is frustrating because the material sounds so wonderful, yet it's difficult to keep a grip on what's happening. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. (Mar.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st edition (March 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670884715
• ISBN-13: 978-0684859262
• ASIN: 0684859262
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (93 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #924,916 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A compelling read but far from his best., February 28, 2000

By	Bernard (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Single & Single (Mass Market Paperback)

After the utter disappointment of The Tailor of Panama, Le Carre's latest novel harks back to his crafty old ways. His writing is superb, particularly in the treatment of the father-son relationship and he knows the way around scenes of physical and psychological tension better than any other author I know. The opening chapters are brilliant and his ability to put together a seemingly complex puzzle is still in top form, albeit with somewhat less shine than in his early masterpieces set during the Cold War. However, this outing is deceptively timid by comparison. The plot, when revealed, is simple and contains no surprises. We know who's the crook from the start, don't we? The approach to the climax is indeed rushed and the big bang one hopes for fails to materialise. Despite these flaws, it's still a very good read and I'm glad to see Le Carre regaining some of the lustre that made him, in my opinion, the best and classiest espionage author of his generation.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanity & loyalty in a setting of ruthless high finance., December 23, 2004

By	M. Haque "masud/torun" (Utrecht, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Single & Single (Mass Market Paperback)

John le Carre has produced another masterful novel. The basic theme is individual decency, loyalty and helplessness. Unlike his Cold War novels, the backdrop is capitalist Russia and international finance, instead of espionage.

This is the story of Oliver Single, apprentice at his father Tiger's financial empire, messenger between Single & Single and a Georgian/Russian family, the Orlovs. He falls in love with the Orlov family and their daughter Goya, but betrays both his father and the Orlovs by walking to the government to tell all. Sent into hiding by the government, he comes out again four years later, in search of his father Tiger Single, who has disappeared after Single & Single's top lawyer is executed on a Turkish hilltop.

Tortured by his betrayal and by his conscience, Oliver is the heart of the novel.

This is also the story of Alix Hoban, a Westernized Russian crook. Married to Goya Orlov but faithful only to himself, Alix makes ambitious plans for selling his peoples' blood to the West, but failing that, runs a drug trafficking business on a massive scale, from Istanbul and Vienna. He tries to take over both the Orlov and the Single empires, but his ruthlessness does not pay off in the end.

This is also the story of Brock, fighting corruption in British law enforcement and running undercover operations for evidence against Single & Single. (This part I found untenable. Aren't ruthless bloodthirsty financialists the engine of Anglo-American growth and imperialism? Why should the British government run operations against its finest wealth-creators? But, okay, fiction is fiction.)

And this novel is a story of ruthlessness, and a vision of how the rich & powerful actually run this world of ours.

But despite the dark backdrop, "Single & Single" is lighter and more hopeful than many of Mr. le Carre's earlier novels.

There is the portrayal of Goya, crying for all the victims of white powder (heroin?) traded by her family. And Aggie, a girl working for Brock, with morals far higher than you would imagine from your knowledge of the English.

And of course there's Oliver, and the little Oliver-Aggie love story.

In its hope and humanity, and with its little love stories, "Single & Single" is a bit like le Carre's "Russia House." A reviewer of "Russia House" said: "Fans of the George Smiley books may find themselves disappointed, but I think fans of Le Carre as the storyteller and writer will be very satisfied." I can say the same of "Single & Single."

As in other le Carre books, you have to get well into the book before you piece together what the story is about. I guess this is not news to le Carre fans, and I hope new readers are not put off by it.

As in the author's other novels, you get a sense of the research that went into the book, and the meticulous connection with reality. Like in le Carre's "Our Game", you get a human picture of peripheral pieces of the Russian empire. How does le Carre know people from so many different places, so well? The Russian murderer rings as true as the Turkish small-town police & mayor, as does the flowing emotions of the Georgian women, and the selfish Polish lawyer.

I also appreciated the smell of Istanbul coming out in the descriptions, soooo real. As well as the descriptions of traveling across Europe, Zurich to Vienna to Istanbul, and the feeling of displacement with too much traveling. Le Carre knows the continent well. I can't testify about the Georgia/Russia descriptions; I haven't been there yet.

The novel begins with the description of an execution, on a Turkish hilltop, carried out ceremonially by a rather international assortment of criminals. This description is masterful, done from the point of view of the condemned.

Well worth the read, and then (like much of le Carre) also worth a second read because you won't get everything the first time around.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don Quixote de la City of London, April 2, 2000

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimi... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Single & Single (Mass Market Paperback)

If you read this book expecting one of Le Carre's spy novels, you will be disappointed because although there are connections to the spy world this is not a spy novel. If you keep an open mind about what will emerge in Single & Single, you will enjoy an interesting tale of good and evil drawn through the detective genre. At its best, Single & Single is as gripping as any Le Carre book -- especially in the first few chapters. The downside is that the tawdriness of almost all the characters make the book a bit of a downer. The Cold War stories in Le Carre's earlier books had the redeeming (and sometimes inspiring) quality of addressing more kinds of potential nobility. The hero in Single & Single is a rewardingly complex figure, righteous yet not always strong enough and conflicted . . . and more than a little idealistic, reminding one of Don Quixote. If you like heros like that, you will very much enjoy the book. If you find small-minded crooks pursuing their ends in petty, immoral ways relatively uninteresting, you will meet a lot of them here. I found myself mixing the crooks up in many cases because they seemed so similar in motivation and characterization. Perhaps the best part of the book is the subtle exploration of a son's feelings for a father, even when that father doesn't really add up to a lot. Although far from his best work (probably because of the subject rather than his writing skill), this Le Carre will satisfy all but the most demanding fans. Those who will be disappointed will include those who want a startling revelation at the end. That's not the way this story is constructed. It would be a mistake not to read it, however, if you are a Le Carre fan or just like a good story.