Absolute Friends by John le Carre
Hodder and Stoughton $250
The end of the cold war presaged the end of the genre that John le Carre mastered through his George Smiley series. In the years since, le Carre has turned to the break-up of the Soviet Union (Our Game), law and order in Russia (Single & Single), supposed espionage in Central America (The Tailor Of Panama) and multinational drug companies in Africa (The Constant Gardener).
His latest effort deals with events in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. But old habits - and plot devices - die hard. More than half of Absolute Friends involves flashbacks to cold war West Berlin and communist Eastern Europe.
The central characters are 'absolute friends' Ted Mundy and Sasha. A child of the British Raj, Ted is a quaintly quintessential Englishman who first meets Sasha, then a radical student anarchist leader, when they are living in a commune in 1969 Berlin, at the height of student unrest in Europe. After being arrested in a riot and severely beaten by the West Berlin police, Ted is deported to England, where he has a series of dead-end jobs before landing a US writing scholarship that leads to a job with a Shakespearean company on tour for the British Council.
The group visits East Germany, where Ted once again meets Sasha, who is now a junior bureaucrat for the Stasi, the East German secret police. Sasha has stolen secrets from the Stasi for years, and proposes that Ted take these to a British embassy contact in West Berlin. When Ted does so he is recruited into British intelligence. Sasha and Ted become highly successful agents during the next 10 years, until Ted's marriage and his language school in Heidelberg fall apart. He tries to eke out a living as a tour guide to English-speaking visitors at Mad King Ludwig's Linderhof castle in Bavaria to support his Turkish common-law wife and her young son in Munich.
