Delicate Truth (le Carre)

Book Reviews
A career’s worth of literary skill and international analysis…..No other writer has chartered…the public and secret history of his times.
Guardian (UK)


Remarkable….[A Delicate Truth] displays the mastery of the early and the passion of late Le Carre.
Robert McCrum - Observer (UK)


Writing of such quality that…it will be read in one hundred years….[Le Carre] found his canvas in espionage, as Dickens did in other worlds. The two men deserve comparison.
Daily Mail  (UK)


The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision…and by the time [Toby's] joined by Kit's alluring daughter the story settles into classic conspiracy thriller territory, the two of them racing to assemble evidence before they can be silenced by the men who pull the strings. As ever, le Carre's prose is fluid, carrying the reader toward an inevitable yet nail-biting climax. This is John le Carre's 23rd novel, and neither prolificacy nor age…has diminished his legendary and sometimes startling gift for mimicry. More than the inventory of closely observed outfits, chronicles of public schools and slumped, bookish frames, it's the voices that give the characters in A Delicate Truth their most immediate claim to three-dimensionality.
Olen Steinhauer - New York Times Book Review


What makes A Delicate Truth work is that the story powers the writerly flourishes and, after a while, vice versa. This is popcorn reading—you can shovel buckets of it into your mouth as you turn the pages. At the same time, the narrative and temporal shifts enhance your sense of the complex choices that men like Paul, Jeb and especially Toby—he is our real hero in a three-man race—have to make, which in turn suggest choices we make as readers. In the case of A Delicate Truth, the rewarding choice is to follow le Carre down the labyrinthine corridors of a novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations.
Colin Fleming - Washington Post

 
Loyalty to the crown is tested; consciences are checked; and nothing is more terrifying than, as this novel’s protagonist puts it, ‘a solitary decider’ asking himself how on earth he talked himself into this mess.
Daily Beast


State-sanctioned duplicity drives bestseller le Carre’s entertainingly labyrinthine if overly polemical 23rd novel.... In 2008, a cloak-and-dagger plot to capture an arms dealer in Gibraltar under the mantle of counterterrorism goes awry.... As usual, le Carre tells a great story in sterling prose, but he veers dangerously close to farce and caricature, particularly with the comically amoral Americans. His best work has been about the moral ambiguity of spying, while this novel feels as if the issue of who’s bad and who’s good is too neatly sewn up.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Le Carre, the author of such 20th-century classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has nothing left to prove except that he can still be stung into turning out suspenseful, totally convincing political object lessons.... His target of choice here is the mendacity of the British government and the easy camaraderie between the public and private sectors. Verdict: This is a guaranteed hair-raising cerebral fright, especially for anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris's The Ghost or who just knows his or her email account has been hacked. —Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Le Carre further establishes himself as a master of a new, shockingly realistic kind of noir.
Booklist


(Starred review.) A colorless midlevel civil servant is... packed off to Gibraltar, where he's to serve as the eyes and ears and, mainly, the yea or nay of rising Member of Parliament Fergus Quinn, who can't afford to be directly connected to Operation Wildlife. On the crucial night the forces in question are to disrupt an arms deal and grab a jihadist purchaser, both Paul and Jeb Owens, the senior military commander on the ground, smell a rat and advise against completing the operation. But they're overridden by Quinn.... Quinn's Private Secretary Toby Bell...becomes painfully aware of irregularities in the official record.... [K]eeping potential action sequences just offstage, le Carre focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence community.
Kirkus Reviews