The absolute friends of the title, British Ted and German Sasha, first meet as students in West Berlin in the late 1960s. Over time, they both become involved in Cold War espionage. The legacy of that involvement gets them tangled with something beyond them in the post-9/11 world where suspicion of terrorism is a good way to credit or discredit many things.

I followed the story fairly well until mid-novel, then I started losing steam (and reading shorter and shorter passages in any one sitting), and struggled through the last 100 pages--which was a pity, as there was rather chilling stuff going on in those 100 pages. ( )

Stunning - an apparently humdrum tale of two old friends who end up almost drifting into the world of espionage with an explosive denoument. ( )

Oddly disappointing for a LeCarre novel. ( )

After watching The Constant Gardner and hearing good things about The Tailor of Panama, I decided I really ought to read a John Le Carre novel. On the recommendation of my roommie, I picked up a recent one called Absolute Friends.

This is the life story of Ted Mundy, failed student, employee, and husband but excellent spy. I suppose my frustration with this book began because I expected it to be a spy novel. For the first half of the book, it simply told Mundy's backstory, a series of meanderings through school, travel, a brief stint of activism in the 60s. Mundy isn't a particularly admirable character. He follows leaders because they are magnetic, not because he's especially attached to their ideals. Finally, after 200 pages he is invited to the service and you realize that his meandering history actually makes him perfect for the role of double agent during the cold war, traveling back and forth between East and West Berlin. He lives a secondary life which he can tell no one of except for his close friend and confidant, his mirror image double agent on the other side.

What happens next? Well, we certainly don't hear about spying. We hear about how his marriage fails and how he's never promoted in his cover job, how he lets go of his son for the sake of his wife's career, how he begins to spend time at peep shows just to waste the hours between spying and how he is casually tossed aside when the Cold War is over. He is truly a pawn of higher forces, and watching him get trod upon is just so depressing. In the end he is set up in a sting operation for no use whatsoever except to increase support for American military hegemony. Two somewhat idealistic but hopeless has-been agents brutally murdered to prove a point.

Now that I think about it, all three Carre pieces (Tailor, Gardner and Absolute Friends) involve the destruction of a normal Joe's life by careless greater powers. Are all Carre's books like this? At least with Clancy you get some of the ins and outs of espionage. Here it was merely the after-effects, the seediness. I even found the style tiresome -- this constant patter of present tense which would be thrilling if it described action, but sounds flat and dry otherwise. I don't mind moral ambiguity in a novel -- it can make it much more interesting and real -- but with neither plot nor hero this just seemed as drab as an East Berlin apartment.

A fine read for Le Carre's fans. This is a more direct and immediate story than his [A Perfect Spy], with many of the same elements but perhaps less depth of character. It has le Carré’s characteristic lonely spy, an ethical man who finds himself adrift and conflicted in a corrupt world, at odds with his handlers while sacrificing his personal life for his work. In this one, we have the life story of a man born to a British military man serving the Raj in Pakistan at the time of Partition. After a troubled youth, the protagonist finds one true friend, an association that ultimately carries them through post-WWII Germany, the Cold War, and into the even darker world of Bush-era neo-con intrigue, much of it perhaps a parallel for le Carré’s own history, certainly a parallel for the world as we have known it over the last 50 years. As in [The Constant Gardner], the author’s theories on the contemporary military-industrial agenda are scary, and worse: they’re believable. ( )