Never able to resist an opportunity to portray himself on a fresh page, Pym went to work. And though, as was his wont, he took care to improve upon the reality, rearranging the facts to fit his prevailing image of himself, an instinctive caution nevertheless counselled him restraint. [p. 289]
I've given this book a low rating because of my emotional reaction to it -- it's splendidly written, but the sheer, empty inevitability of the ending left me feeling hollow myself.
Magnus Pym, diplomat and secret agent, goes missing after the funeral of his charismatic con-man father Rick. The reader knows that he's checked in, as Mr Canterbury, at a bed-and-breakfast in a seaside town in Devon: he's well-known to his landlady there, and it's a safe bolthole for him to write the story of his life, or lives.
Meanwhile his mentor, Jack Brotherhood, is leading the hunt for Magnus, and beginning to uncover traces of Magnus' double life: his long friendship with Czech agent Axel, his multiple affairs and his relationship with his wife Mary and son Tom, and above all his defining relationship with his father. It's a series of betrayals, a house of cards held together by a son who's inherited his father's gift of masks. Does the son have a heart, a soul? Hard to say.
The narrative is often very entertaining (high points include Rick's attempt to become an MP) and meticulously observed: a glance between two guests at a dinner party; a woman walking as though she hates her skirts; Tom (Pym's son) reading a fantasy novel, 'a book in which everything came right', over and over again.
A Perfect Spy is a long read, and I found myself drawn into some scenes at the expense of the overall arc and its inexorable march towards an unhappy ending. Apparently this is Le Carré's most autobiographical novel, and I applaud him for being capable of laughing at some aspects which -- if not heavily gilded for the purposes of fiction -- must have been appalling to experience.
Beautifully written, a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts: but it left me low.
No comments:
Post a Comment