CONSUMMATE

John Le Carré at his very best. Beautifully read by Michael Jayston. Had me so entranced I missed my turning from the motorway!

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1 person found this helpful

Complex, but a great listen

Great narration as always and a complex story. Interesting, and beautifully written. Very much worth a credit.

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Well read in a strong believable voice.

The ending is different to the film adaptation, which I believe is better because your mind makes its own predictions of the outcome, which I'm finding aren't quite as nice.

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12 people found this helpful

Love and Espionage

Exquisite writing and cleverly cloaking a love story behind the smoke and mirrors of the spying game.

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2 people found this helpful

Not his best

But a good story of spying and human frailty which I suppose are his strengths

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Can the source be trusted?

Le Carré gets all political on us in this one.

When three explosive notebooks smuggled out of the Soviet Union turn up via the back door at the British Secret Service, an innocent, if drunken, civilian named Barley Scott-Blair unwittingly finds himself the lynchpin of an operation to meet and validate the source of the information. But unknown to him, the material he is sent to validate is ruffling a lot of vested interests on the other side of the Atlantic.

Formally, the story is told by one of its dramatis personae, de Palfrey. He tells it, however, rather in the manner of an omniscient narrator. At the very end of the book le Carré makes a valiant attempt to explain this impossible knowledge, not entirely successfully. However, this literary device isn’t overcooked (as a similar device was arguably overcooked in ‘A Perfect Spy’), and it doesn’t detract from the adventure.

The question which runs throughout the novel is, “Can the source be trusted?” The characters fret and fret their way through this question, and in the end it is that question which provides the crucial turning-point of the story.

The plot and characterizations are very well worked, all wound up with a very satisfying ending.

Also there is one particularly funny and memorable phrase used perhaps a quarter of the way through the book. It starts with the word ‘Jesuitical.’

With hindsight this novel seems curiously prescient. Much of what le Carré suggests in this story, particularly in the material of the notebooks, almost presages the collapse of the Soviet Union. Le Carré published this novel on 22nd May 1989; the Berlin Wall fell in November of the same year, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union was no more.

Michael Jayston’s narration is, as ever, excellent. He really brings the story to life. My only slight criticism would be his voicing of an early character in the first two chapters, Nicky Landau. Landau is supposed to be a Pole who has spent most of his life in the East End of London, but Jayston manages to make him sound more South African than London Polish.

Overall a really good listen, highly recommended.

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Le Carre in sentimental mood

This is a review for the Audible version, which is a good reading by a veteran actor for the good old days of audio books. The accents are not all spot on, but the faded, world-weary Englishness is. This is a book about the tortures of love as much as it is about the techniques and technology of spycraft, and I must say I think that this author is better at one than the other.

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I listened but nearly gave up.

Lots of people have loved this book but was Le Carre told he had to write this many words? The basic storyline could have been thrilling but just became tedious to listen to. I’m aware that “spying is waiting” but this was drawn out way too much for me. It had some interesting moments, hence three stars but I wanted the characters to shine a bit more and they just didn’t for me. I couldn’t decide whether to like Barley or not; he was just tiresome. Having said that, credit for the end as I didn’t think it would happen like that. Just not a story for me, sadly.

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For completists only; not one of le Carré's best

I am a huge John le Carré fan but had somehow not got round to reading or listening to The Russia House and now I almost wish I hadn't. The author is so very, very good at his best but this mundane affair was nowhere near the same league as the Smiley books.

At its core is a tale revolving around the biggest of dramas; the nuclear stand-off between power blocs and the dark pantomime which it requires. Fear, uncertainty and doubt of one's own side, let alone the enemy's, make every action as futile as it is vital.

But this is all seen through the lens of a central character who, the reader is constantly told, is a fascinating, flawed man but who comes across as merely tiresome. Not dissimilar in that regard to the protagonist in The Honourable Schoolboy.The romance, such as it is, creaks rather than convinces. Barley bores rather than intrigues. Michael Jayston is a supreme narrator but even he seems to have found progress tiresome and it occasionally results in a threadbare performance, which I have never encountered from him before. By the time the story stumbled its way to the end, he sounded as unexcited by it as I was.

I'm in a minority here; and happy to be so if it means that most people seem to have loved this book. But for me it will be the only time I give it a listen.

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Masterful !

A masterpiece of story telling. Thoroughly enjoyable read. John Le Carre always grips you tightly

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