Le Carr, John
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A small town in Germany
John Le Carr
Manufacturer: Heinemann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0006D5MWC |
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Secret Pilgrim
John Le Carr
Manufacturer: Hodder Pb
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0340924349 |
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Along Blazed Trails (The Children's Hour, 11)
Cornelia Meigs, Evelyn Sickels, Mabel Leigh Hunt Enid LaMonte Meadowcroft , Mary Jane Carr, Emma L. Brock, Marjorie Hayes , Milton Richards, Carol Ryrie Brink Stephen Vincent Benet , Meridel Le Sueur, Alexander Key Laura Ingalls Wilder , Russell Gordon Carter, James Daugherty Elizabeth Coatsworth , Harry Edward Neal, Easter Forbes Laura Benet , Louisa May Alcott, Julia Davis Evelyn Sickels , Joseph A. Altsheler, Charles Major Eva March Tappan , Edger Wyatt, Dee Dunsing Samuel Clemens , and Arthur Gutterman Theodore Roosevelt
Manufacturer: The Spencer Press, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NCYOJS |
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Call for the Dead
John Le Carr?
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Canada, Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000JGP0NM |
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The Mission Song
John Le Carr?
Manufacturer: Hodder Australia
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000RQV39E |
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Absolute Friends
John Le Carr?
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Canada, Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000HR88A0 |
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- Singularly uninvolving
- After the fall
- Single & Single
- Subpar effort by Le Carre
- Humanity & loyalty in a setting of ruthless high finance.
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Single & Single
John Le Carr
Manufacturer: BCA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
Similar Items:
- Our Game
- The Constant Gardener: A Novel
- A Perfect Spy
- The Tailor of Panama
- The Russia House
ASIN: B0006DL9WY |
Amazon.com
On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.
The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls "the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East." In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations--illegal drugs--and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, "Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally."
Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog--why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world.
Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. --Tim Appelo
Book Description
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel of espionage opens with a haunting set piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. This is a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in the West. Le Carré's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate portrait of two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed, and redeemed, by a son.
This is territory le Carré knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.
Download Description
A lawyer from the London banking house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain a deposit of over five million pounds sterling in his daughter's trust. A Russian freighter is intercepted by police in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant banker, "Tiger" Single, disappears into thin air.
Customer Reviews:
Singularly uninvolving.......2007-05-26
Man, I had trouble with this one. It never grew on me, I could not empathize with a single character. Le Carré is struggling now that he's lost the big bad Soviet Union as a subject. He is exploring the corruptions of the Cold War now among the capitalist financiers of modern bourgeois Russia, which resembles Columbia remarkably. Tiger Single has formed an impregnable banking fund that is targeted by his own quasi-criminal clients when things begin to go awry. Disappointingly, he remains an enigmatic, barely visible protagonist (villain?) behind the scene. His son, Oliver, stands to inherit the empire, but he is less than, ah, supportive of the enterprise. The story requires that Tiger have an awfully blind eye to his son, supposedly his protegé, but acting like a mere donkey or legman. I could just never believe that Oliver grew up in the business so remakably ignorant of its real "business." He has the hallmarks of a rich and idle young man until a sudden, inexplicable epiphany upon which the story turns. Why his character so radically changes, or even what prompts it, remains a mystery to me. Maybe that is a facet of the demi-monde which Le Carré loves. Oliver's turn-about solves a chief mystery of the story, and I think Le Carré struggles to find suspense to carry us through the rest of the story.
Truly, there is much shadow in Le Carré's story--after a terrific, riveting, implacable set-piece opening scene. It was downhill from there, although I did keep wondering about the next plot twist, or if Le Carré could find one to maintain my interest. As always, his prose is precise and evocative. My Pocket Star Book copy (2000) has a different cover, and its pages are already yellowing: not a problem as I don't consider this a "keeper."
After the fall.......2006-06-29
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Le Carre wrote magnificent spy stories. Then the wall fell, and what was he to do? He takes up writing stories about international drug and arms dealers, and pharmaceutical cartels,and tricks them out with all the midnight meetings of the Home Office mandarins,and their ilk, that he previously wrote so well about, but in the case of international drug-arms smugglers, it's definitely the mountains laboring to bring forth a mouse.
Single and Single, unfortunately, follows the same pattern, though there's also some patter about smuggling blood, perhaps based in research. Her Majesty's Customs Service is all over the story, safe houses, hard men, smart beautiful talented women from Glasgow, and all. It's hard to believe in such a proactive bureacracy in hidebound Britain, aside, of course, from the fabled MI5 of LeCarre's good old days. The obligatory love interest strains credulity: I can't recall ever seeing such an extraordinary female customs employee at any British airport; and we're given precious little indication of what such a woman might see in Oliver Single. The book does begin, at least, with a bang,set on a mountainside in Turkey, it's one of LeCarre's more powerful openings. And the central conflict, between Oliver Single, and his rogue Dad, Tiger Single (thus Single and Single), has some credibility and resonance:Le Carre has let it be known that his own father was a rogue,and a con man.
Single & Single.......2006-04-12
This is a novel about greed, avarice, power and ethics. It asks the question, "When money is no object, when you have the power and resources to do anything you can think of, what will you choose to do?" LeCarre` puts us in front of a wonderfully crafted mirror, allows us to see our own motivations and ethical values, and then shoves unimaginably difficult choices at us. This book is a masterpiece of thought-provoking character development. The foils he presents are not driven as much by the characters themselves as by the cultural values they represent. LeCarre` understands that the languages we speak and the cultures they evolve from determine how we think about abstract concepts such as 'profit' and 'power.' In the Russian language there is no idiomatic equivalent for the concept of profit as it is used in the West - acquiring a commodity at a low price, adding value and selling at a higher price, is a concept that is simply not found in the Russian culture. Instead, as LeCarre`s characters show us, wholesale theft and resale of such essential human commodities as blood supplies becomes the operative dynamic for a money-making scheme gone awry. The House of Single is the mirror of every man's opportunity to make critical choices based on moral and ethical values. What happens to this venerable institution is what happens to all of us when we refuse to intervene in affairs that are immoral, unethical, manipulative, exploitive and fundamentally self-serving. I loved this book because it is the product of careful craftsmanship, clear thinking and a deep understanding of what is wrong with the way we treat each other. The language is richly constructed. The dialog is masterful - the reader is never put in the position of having to try to figure out who is speaking. The gestalt of this book is pure LeCarr` - rich, powerful and authentic. I highly recommend to anyone who is grappling with such choices.
Subpar effort by Le Carre.......2005-09-20
Oh, dear. Le Carre is, or was earlier in his career, a brilliant writer.
I have read and reread a number of Le Carre books lately and what is clear to me is that the quality of his novels has deteriorated over the years, as one might expect, I suppose. Single and Single reads like something written to fill out a publishing contract for a certain number of books.
The plots meanders and is hard to follow. You may think that this is par for the course in the novels of Le Carre, but all I can say is that his better works like Spy Who Came In and Honourable Schoolboy have elements of this trickiness, but it is not overdone.
There is a certain tendency in modern English novelists--I'm thinking of people like Martin Amis--to give the reader a hard time, and in his later books Le Carre seems to be increasingly of the school of letting the reader try to figure out on his own what is going on in the book. My interpretation is that this is due to lazy writing, and the author losing sight of the reader. Others may disagree.
In earlier novels Le Carre leaned a great deal on what appeared to be inside knowledge of the espioniage business. Well, he had me convinced, anyway. Once he gets away from that territory, it seems to me that he is much more inauthentic.
My guess is that the character of Tiger Single is somewhat based on Le Carre's own father, who was something of a jet-set conman.
The book has plently of brilliantly witty dialog, very much a Le Carre specialty, and passages of superb descriptive writing, so all is not lost, but I would only recommend it for the diehard Le Carre fan who has read everything else and has a lot of time on his/her hands.
Humanity & loyalty in a setting of ruthless high finance........2004-12-24
John le Carre has produced another masterful novel. The basic theme is individual decency, loyalty and helplessness. Unlike his Cold War novels, the backdrop is capitalist Russia and international finance, instead of espionage.
This is the story of Oliver Single, apprentice at his father Tiger's financial empire, messenger between Single & Single and a Georgian/Russian family, the Orlovs. He falls in love with the Orlov family and their daughter Goya, but betrays both his father and the Orlovs by walking to the government to tell all. Sent into hiding by the government, he comes out again four years later, in search of his father Tiger Single, who has disappeared after Single & Single's top lawyer is executed on a Turkish hilltop.
Tortured by his betrayal and by his conscience, Oliver is the heart of the novel.
This is also the story of Alix Hoban, a Westernized Russian crook. Married to Goya Orlov but faithful only to himself, Alix makes ambitious plans for selling his peoples' blood to the West, but failing that, runs a drug trafficking business on a massive scale, from Istanbul and Vienna. He tries to take over both the Orlov and the Single empires, but his ruthlessness does not pay off in the end.
This is also the story of Brock, fighting corruption in British law enforcement and running undercover operations for evidence against Single & Single. (This part I found untenable. Aren't ruthless bloodthirsty financialists the engine of Anglo-American growth and imperialism? Why should the British government run operations against its finest wealth-creators? But, okay, fiction is fiction.)
And this novel is a story of ruthlessness, and a vision of how the rich & powerful actually run this world of ours.
But despite the dark backdrop, "Single & Single" is lighter and more hopeful than many of Mr. le Carre's earlier novels.
There is the portrayal of Goya, crying for all the victims of white powder (heroin?) traded by her family. And Aggie, a girl working for Brock, with morals far higher than you would imagine from your knowledge of the English.
And of course there's Oliver, and the little Oliver-Aggie love story.
In its hope and humanity, and with its little love stories, "Single & Single" is a bit like le Carre's "Russia House." A reviewer of "Russia House" said: "Fans of the George Smiley books may find themselves disappointed, but I think fans of Le Carre as the storyteller and writer will be very satisfied." I can say the same of "Single & Single."
As in other le Carre books, you have to get well into the book before you piece together what the story is about. I guess this is not news to le Carre fans, and I hope new readers are not put off by it.
As in the author's other novels, you get a sense of the research that went into the book, and the meticulous connection with reality. Like in le Carre's "Our Game", you get a human picture of peripheral pieces of the Russian empire. How does le Carre know people from so many different places, so well? The Russian murderer rings as true as the Turkish small-town police & mayor, as does the flowing emotions of the Georgian women, and the selfish Polish lawyer.
I also appreciated the smell of Istanbul coming out in the descriptions, soooo real. As well as the descriptions of traveling across Europe, Zurich to Vienna to Istanbul, and the feeling of displacement with too much traveling. Le Carre knows the continent well. I can't testify about the Georgia/Russia descriptions; I haven't been there yet.
The novel begins with the description of an execution, on a Turkish hilltop, carried out ceremonially by a rather international assortment of criminals. This description is masterful, done from the point of view of the condemned.
Well worth the read, and then (like much of le Carre) also worth a second read because you won't get everything the first time around.
Authors:
- Le Fanu, J. Sheridan
- Le Guin, Ursula K.
- Leacock, Stephen
- Lear, Edward
- Leary, Timothy
- Paul Léautaud
- Léautaud, Paul
- Ledwidge, Francis
- Lee, Harper
- Lee, Sharon
Authors
Authors