Monday, September 12, 2011

Absolute Friends by John LeCarre

The reason I tagged this book as "U.S. politics" will be clear to anyone who has read the final quarter of this book. Principally, it is not very kind to the American neoconservatives and the Iraq War initiative by the Bush Adminstration. It is also quite critical of conservative media, such as Fox News. With it's British interests, it also says unflattering things of Blair and the Coalition of the Willing and British media.

As such, I realized that may have been why I found the recent LeCarre tome on Goodwill shelves...twice in one week! It may have been distasteful to many conservative American readers, and thus more likely to be discarded. Sad, but to my benefit. LeCarre fans may have been used to the authors' pro-Western stance during his many Cold War novels, and many thus caught off guard. I only speculate.

This is a very very powerful book and I thuroughly enjoyed the experience. I intend to recommend it to friends of discernment.

The only negative I saw is that the book followed very closely the story arch I have seen in other LeCarre books, specifically The Constant Gardener. The ending is different, for sure, but too similar to escape my notice.

Ooh: http://kidicarus222.blogspot.com/2011/08/legend-of-zeldas-considerably-less.html

2 comments:

  1. i see a lot of his books available used, so it may just be that his fans want to read him as soon as he's available but don't want to keep him. i tend to keep everything, which is a habit i'm trying to break.

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  2. I also tend to keep more than I should. I applaud your efforts.

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