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Loading... Our Game (1995)by John le Carré
NIL   rustyoldboat | May 28, 2011 |  Am i becoming insensed? Lately the books i've read just done do it for me. this was lecarre, i should be disappointed it's over, not disappointed that i read it. I mean the book was ok, the last bit was good but not great. (when he was in russia). but overall it was drole. i hate to even say that but it's true. if you're a lecarre fan you'll be ok with it but it still won't be anything special. (  ) krushkelsey | May 2, 2011 | Almost quit reading this one before I reached the end, but glad in continued. First thirteen chapters (2 stars out of 5) are the backstory of two “retired” cold war warriors. The plot weaves the present (c. 1995) with the prior 20 years of spying between the UK and the USSR. This section moved a bit too slow for my tastes. Whereas the last two chapters (4 stars out of 5) were set in the Caucasian Mountains of Russia and dealt with the ethnic conflicts there and is set just to the West of Chechenia. The plot state that the Georgians participated with the Russians in ethic cleansing of the Ossetians, which prepared the Ossetians for participating in the ethic cleansing of the Ingushetians . This section focuses on the leadership and customs of the latter group and was actually quite interesting. Recommended only for students of mountain peoples or diehards of the Le Carre canon. (Average: 2½ stars out of 5). ( ) BookWallah | Jan 17, 2011 | Another very good read and a more satisfying ending than in some of the author's other work. (  ) petermcgurk | Dec 20, 2010 | Permanent Collection ( ) Nancylouu | Jul 5, 2008 |
Mr. le Carré's great strength is that he is a master plotter. His premise of intelligence agents running amok since the end of the cold war is totally plausible, and the way he links his major characters through their professional roles is ingenious. After taking forever to get there, the reader comes across some 40 pages that are as taut and thrilling as any adventure story I have ever read. They just happen to consist of continuous narrative -- with no tricky flashbacks, very little psychologizing and no political lectures -- and they provide a momentum that lifts almost the entire last third of the novel. If only the first 200 pages were like that, former readers of Hotspur and Triumph (including this one) would be enthralled.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0345400003, Mass Market Paperback)"FURIOUS IN ACTION...TAKES US BY THE NECK ON PAGE ONE AND NEVER LETS GO."--Chicago Sun-Times With the Cold War fought and won, British spymaster Tim Cranmer accepts early retirement to rural England and a new life with his alluring young mistress Emma. But when both Emma and Cranmer's star double agent and lifelong rival, Larry Pettifer, disappear, Cranmer is suddenly on the run, searching for his brilliant protégé, desperately eluding his former colleagues, in a frantic journey across Europe and into the lawless, battered landscapes of Moscow and southern Russia, to save whatever of his life he has left.... "IRRESISTIBLE...A sinuous plot, leisurely introduced, whose coils become increasingly constricting. There is crisp, intelligent dialogue, much of it riding an undercurrent of menace. And there is a hero who does not see himself as heroic but who struggles with inner demons as much as with the forces arrayed against him." --Time "AS THRILLING AS LE CARRÉ GETS...The novel has the heartstop duplicity of A Perfect Spy and some of the outraged honor of The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl." --The Boston Globe "GRIPPING." --The Christian Science Monitor A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:47:02 -0500) At Forty-Eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement to deepest rural England. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard, and his beautiful young mistress, Emma. But no man can escape his past, and Tim's lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer: bored radical don, philanderer, and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. Between the two stands an unresolved rivalry that dates all the way back to their shared boyhood at public school.As the story opens, Larry and Emma have disappeared. Have they run off together? Are they lovers? Has Larry lured Emma into some dark game she cannot understand? Setting off in pursuit of them, Tim discovers that he too is being pursued, by his former masters. The hunter becomes the hunted. Raiding his own past like a thief, he follows Larry and Emma into the minefield - physical and emotional - of their new allegiance. And as Tim advances across the moral wastes of post-Cold War Europe - the battered landscape of England after Thatcher, the lawless worlds of Moscow and Southern Russia - his dilemma deepens. Finding himself deprived of both past and future, a dispossessed loyalist, he must grapple with his own leftover humanity as the values he fought to preserve fall away, and the spectre of the reinvented Russian empire begins to haunt the ruins of the Soviet dream.… (more) |
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