A Most Wanted Man | 
 enlarge | Author: John Le Carre
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
Buy New: $10.99
You Save: $17.01 (61%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  112 reviews
Sales Rank: 242
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 1416594884
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781416594888
ASIN: 1416594884
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
New spies with new loyalties, old spies with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good but caught in the moral maze; all the sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love or pity and remain good "patriots" -- this is the fabric of John le Carre's fiercely compelling and current novel A Most Wanted Man.A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa. Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client's survival becomes more important to her than her own career -- or safety. In pursuit of Issa's mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Freres, a failing British bank based in Hamburg. Annabel, Issa and Brue form an unlikely alliance -- and a triangle of impossible loves is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the "War on Terror," the rival spies of Germany, England and America converge upon the innocents. Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 107 more reviews...
 Profound and shallow at the same time. December 3, 2008
John Le Carre's A Most Wanted Man begins strong by introducing us to a multi-faceted and realistic description of Melik and his mother's life as Turkish immigrants in a post 9/11 Europe. And complicating this precarious situation is Issa, a Chechen stowaway who forces himself into their lives, leading to unwanted complications. The novel then introduces us to the other main protagonists, Annabel Richter, a human rights lawyer for a non-governmental organization and Tommy Brue, an English private banker. They get involved with Issa, and eventually the heads of British, German and American intelligence services since their mutual client (Issa) is a suspected terrorist.
Essentially, the novel depicts the machinations of the different intelligence services in the war against terror and the mostly undesirable repercussions of their policies among bystanders and innocents. It is an interesting read by itself, given the depth and insightful descriptions of Brue's and Richter's motivations and doubts, but since it comes with the marque of John Le Carre, the reader is expecting more. What we get is a fairly humdrum, ordinary snapshot of what happens to ants when elephants dance, with a lot of repetitive descriptions of the characters inner musings and flaws.
A Most Wanted Man is a novel of contradictions. It's a profound character study but the plot is quite shallow. It's short but it tends to be drawn out. It begins strong and ends weakly. It is a novel by a master but comes off like a novice.
 Good story but trite ending - disappointing December 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having read almost every LeCarre novel, I found this one developed a good story line, but the author used the last few pages to take a swipe at the US by showing the american characters as cowboys without true intelligence/information. The ending was ruined for me by overtly derogatory statements by the author.
I think in his later years LeCarre must have started reading and believing Ian Fleming's Bond novels.
 book purchase December 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Book sold as new, and was indeed. Price was right, and I love this author.
Taut and concise characters and story December 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I woke up and dug right into John Le Carre's latest: A Most Wanted Man. Wonderful, taunt, without "Bourne Conspiracy" chases, but with plenty of tension. I was forced to stop at page 272 of a 322-page book in order to prepare for my return from vacation. The forced stop allowed me time to realize that Le Carre's prose is never overblown but is always precisely descriptive. Some writers, as they age, go on and on, making the books fatter and fatter. This book has embraced a difficult and layered situation and emerged as a novel that is under 400 pages.
Yes, like some of Le Carre's recent books, the Americans come off as the bad guys. I would be disturbed if it were not for the fact that we have been the new Imperialists lately--and not very good imperialists at that. In Le Carre's novels, the old world is immoral and conflicted, but the new world is immoral and frightening sure of themselves. I would still recommend the book. Perhaps we can convince James Sallis or another American writer to give us a nuanced view of the American spy world. As it is, this book describes people forced to choose between several bad choices. They are human; they are us.
Death Will Have Your Eyes: A Novel About Spies
A word about the ending (with spoilers) . . . December 1, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
At its very end A Most Wanted Man may not be written carefully enough to remain convincing, once it has arrived at the inner world and motivations of 'Newt,' the devil-bearded C.I.A. operative who is on the scene outside the bank to explain to Bachmann the decision to seize (and 'render,' and torture) Dr. Abdullah and Issa Karpov. What makes the problem worse is that absolutely everything leading up to Newt's monologue is fantastic--right down to having the kidnapping van crash into Bachmann's 'taxi' in the middle of a paragraph, instead of at the start of one. You can hear and see the collision, and the lights. (Just as you could hear and see the lights and gunfire on the wall at the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.)
I find the 'anti-Americanism' that other reviewers here complain of to be a false scent. Le Carre is anti-everything, pretty nearly, insofar as it involves a national identity, and he's certainly against any large, self-serving and secretive organization. That's in no way a problem for the novel, but a source of its strength. Barely contained outrage is Le Carre's plotting engine, in everything that he writes (even in The Tailor of Panama, which I think at its heart badly wanted to become something as close to pure comedy as Le Carre has ever written).
I find most of the human relationships in the book, including the ones that don't come off, completely convincing. No one working this terrain has ever described the besotted but well-meaning male brain, moment by moment, unbidden thought by thought, smile by sudden, flooding smile, so well as Le Carre does with Brue (his alter ego, and this novel's version of Barley Blair from The Russia House).
No--the only unworkable thing is the dialogue and set of thoughts that are given to the C.I.A. man at the end, when all is revealed. These revelations come off as tin-eared, and suggest that Le Carre might have done well simply to take a few weeks to listen to American voices, both for tone and content, as they talk about such things, before signing off on this last section. It may have been written in a rush.
For 'Newt' is made to say a lot, and a lot of what he says tends to spoil the reader's suspension of disbelief. There are problems at the technical level. In quick succession 'Newt' says, for example, both "Eye for a f--ing eye, Guenther," and a strangely British "Eh?" Profanity is a substitute for thought in most living conversation, and Le Carre puts it into the mouths of characters like Newt as an easy substitute, I think, for his own, novelist's thought--the difficult, sometimes morally disorienting work of inhabiting and giving voice to each of his characters' worlds.
In his best novels, Le Carre can show clearly how hard it is to have faith in any 'side.' Yet here it's impossible to be confused, for so much as a chapter, about where one's sympathies are to lie. Every word makes it clear that we should identify wholly with the radiant heroine, and with the feelings she inspires in everyone around her.
But these are quibbles. I would agree with the '95 percent good' assessment above: A Most Wanted Man is a terrific book, with an almost unbearably tense and suspenseful conclusion. Its understory is lovely: the improbable hope of somehow turning pure after a lifetime of impurity, like a Lipizzaner lightening as it ages. And I can't wait to see where the vein of subject matter that he has tapped here is going to lead its author.
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