Another Le Carre, another cracker of a read. He really was the master. This time the intrigue revolves around an off-the-books operation gone bad, and the ensuing cover up.
A rogue minister has worked with a mercenary outfit to attempt an illegal extraordinary rendition, but bad things happen; a foreign office worker then slips ever deeper into this murky world as he tries to uncover the truth.
His ability to drop in and out of his characters’ thoughts, blended with the time jumps their memories would naturally make, brilliantly conveys the uncertainty and paranoia of their worlds. Although as ever, all his key characters live in an upper middle class, cricket-playing, Oxbridge-educated culture which seems increasingly anachronistic in the 21st century.
But his magic wordplay cuts through all that and delivers a simply fantastic story which I genuinely struggled to put down.
