Both Ted Mundy and Sasha, who meet in Berlin during the radical sixties, are outcasts and misfits in their native worlds, a fact which draws them to one another and leads to their becoming each other's "secret sharers." They share political street action in their youth, Cold War spy games for much of adult life, then bewildered searching after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They come together for their last adventure in current times, our times, and a final violent confrontation with the forces they loathe, forces now personified by the global corporatization of the world. The more literary of the reviews frequently mention Joseph Conrad, and I think rightly so. Ted Mundy's persona, with his colonial past, his longing and seeking for identity, certainly leads us in that direction.
I've now read reviews calling this a brilliant book, a clumsy political polemic, le Carré's best book, his latelife senile rant, etc. etc. Michiko Kakutani in the NYT is perhaps the nastiest, using the quote from the book that turns up in every single review to make one of her points: "To make matters worse, many of the people in the later sections of the book no longer converse but simply trade angry political screeds: 'it was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty' one character says of the Iraq war, 'and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-9/11 psychopathy.' To this reader that quote sounds like a fairly accurate description of the Iraq war, not an "angry political screed."
(Continues in Part 3)
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