monk222: (Books)
monk222 ([personal profile] monk222) wrote2007-11-01 09:31 pm
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John le Carre


“We'd have been all right if we'd been working class,” she said once, with a wise and hopeless smile. “You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of capital run against you - it's life, it's reality, you know where you are. But we weren't working class. We were us. The winning side. And all of a sudden we'd joined the losers.”

-- The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carre

We are a little over a hundred pages, about a quarter of the book, and I am reminded of how le Carre brings literary finesse to the spy novel. This is a rereadable as much as Charles Dickens is a rereadable. His writing is not particularly poetic, but his prose is compelling and full; it's a richly laid out narrative. And it doesn't hurt that we are talking about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I think I'm going to need to make le Carre a part of the routine, taking up one of his novels at least once a year.

xXx