Jun
20
Well, I said I was not going to read a new Le Carre for a while, and then I come across THE NIGHT MANAGER at my local bookstore and how can I pass it up. And it was good. Not TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, but still good. No matter how much he stuck with the protagonist, Pine, or Thomas, or whatever you want to call him, no matter how much I read about him, I still didn’t care about him. And I didn’t care about the girls, no matter leggy or chestnut haired he made them. It was the plot, the many cogged plot, one turning another, turning another in a network complex and unreliable.
In this quagmire of intention and power, Le Carre paints the contemporary man, battling itself. It is a little too right and wrong for might taste, but the picture of man up against a fog of bureaucracy is as beautiful as the island living Le Carre paints around it.The frustration is palpable, perhaps heightened by the overly longwinded descriptions the reader has to slug through.
THE NIGHT MANAGER covers a lot of territory, from Egypt, to Switzerland, England, the Caribbean, Columbia, and Panama, and the web it paints is as large, but Le Carre makes it manageable for the reader, connecting the dots just enough for the picture to come into view when it is needed, but not so complex as to be overburdening. There is less of the deep back stories from many characters, which I was glad of, and more following of the action.
Not action in terms of men running around with guns, all the gun running takes place in sealed crates. The action is in the conversations, the back rooms thinking of scenarios and counter scenarios. Could the ending have more finesse? Yes, it was muscled through a bit, as if to say the only way to take down the delicate web of counter point is to charge headlong into with angry muscle, scars be damned. But not matter, it is the web that is the star, the balancing of interests our heros try to map and understand, and with them the reader as well.
