A great story involving British intelligence efforts to gain Russian secrets. The characters have great depth and the story wrestles with the human and moral aspects of the player. The ending is one that makes you think and the book is well worth the tred. I wouldn't say the book is a "page turner", but rather its one where the story remains off interest and quite a pleasure to read, with ample "food for thought" provided on the study of both human nature and geo-politics. ( )

This is almost perfect Le Carré — world weary but romantic; cynical but whimsical. The setting is a world thrown into confusion by Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. And I guess much like spy-novelists, the spies are unsure whether to pull up stumps and congratulate each on a 'good game' or to dig in for the inevitable double-cross. With such a rich and complex milieu, it is perhaps understandable — forgivable? beneficial? — that the plot is more straightforward than his earlier works. That's not to say it lacks excitement, but at times Le Carré is actively deflating the tension — hinting at what will transpire — as if he (through his proxy, the equivocating legal council to the secret service, with a faint whiff of regret and reluctance) no longer wants to participate in the inflationary hyperbole of the cold war of words, which supported the ever-accelerating arms race.

All that said, this is very recognisable Le Carré, with strong echoes of some of his best work. It acts as a wonderful, questioning, almost absurd (with its protagonist of a alcoholic, jazz sax-playing, minor publisher) punctuation mark to a long phase of his career, wrestling with the practice of and theory behind the cold war.

Perhaps because of that, it is a very thoughtful book, and offers no easy answers (though Le Carré's leanings certainly come through). Beautifully written, with some marvelous bon mots. I fully expect to re-read this at some point.

One final note — I was amazed to see that the shabby, dissolute publisher is played on film by Sean Connery; I had pictured him as a glasses-wearing cross between Christopher Hitchens and Peter Mannion from The Thick Of It. ( )

Nicely paced. There was a sense of where things would go, right from the start. But just how they would get there... ( )

Solid spy fiction from le Carre. I found it slowed a bit in the middle, but the beginning was entertaining and the final third engrossing. ( )

This proved to be a good holiday read. You know what you are going to get when you pick up a Le Carré novel especially one entitled The Russia House. It is the time of Perestroika in Russia, but the spying game continues as normal. The British spies think that they have stumbled onto a scoop with a high placed Russian teetering on the edge of revealing the state of Russia's armaments programme. The only problem is that the connection has been made by the director of a publishing firm who publishes occasional Russian novels and who twenty years ago had been on the books of the British secret services. Barley Blair is typically upper class English with possible communist leanings: we all know the type, but there is a file on Blair on which someone had written 20 years ago "No Further Action (in brackets Ever)." What could possibly go wrong in recruiting Blair again, but the prize or the bait was so tempting.

The first part of the story deals with the services attempts re-recruit Blair, he is reluctant, but has fallen under the charms of a Russian woman he met at a publishing bash in Moscow, who is the key to the source of the tantalising information. The Americans get involved working with the British in trying to ascertain the reliability of Blair and the information source. The British team full of characters, old hands in the world of spying, pitch in to work with the more professional American Team. Barley Blair likes a drink, in fact drinking gets him through much of his life, but he has charm and is intelligent enough to avoid obvious pit falls. Much of the early part of the book is conversations usually with or about Barley Blair and it is these conversation that provide a link to a narrative that drives the second part of the novel.

Le Carré makes his spies human, they are characters, not cogs in a machine. Probably the office clerks or the computer people do all the hard background and number crunching work, but we do not hear much about this. We understand that agents in the field play a dangerous game and that "Joes" (people controlled by the professionals) are in fear of their lives, but any violence or assassinations take place outside of the narrative. It is a novel that thrives on mystery, the dropping of clues as to who is reliable or who plays a better game. Office politics seems more dangerous than the actual spying; It's all a bit of a cuddle really, but I was happy to go along for the ride and so 3.5 stars. ( )