The Secret Pilgrim

Fülszöveg

FQR THE PAST THIRTY YEARS John le Carré has delighted his readership with a comédie humaine of the secret world, which always reflected the contemporary scene, and sometimes eerily predicted it. Thus, before the Cold War had officially ended, he was giving us The Russia House, which not only foresaw the totál demise of the Iron Curtain but triumphantly heralded the era of glasnost.
In The Secret Pilgrim, le Carré nimbly contrives to look both forward and backward at the same time. Who were we in those Cold War years? he asks -and what will we become now that the conventional clichés of hostility have been swept away?
He gives us a past defined by Before the Fali and After the Fali, and the Fali was the unmasking of the master traitor Bili Haydon.
He gives us a future perhaps equally dangerous, waiting to be written.
The questions are posed, in part, by Ned - surname unknown - whose final task in the evening of his long intelligence career is to train the new generation of men... Tovább

Fülszöveg

FQR THE PAST THIRTY YEARS John le Carré has delighted his readership with a comédie humaine of the secret world, which always reflected the contemporary scene, and sometimes eerily predicted it. Thus, before the Cold War had officially ended, he was giving us The Russia House, which not only foresaw the totál demise of the Iron Curtain but triumphantly heralded the era of glasnost.
In The Secret Pilgrim, le Carré nimbly contrives to look both forward and backward at the same time. Who were we in those Cold War years? he asks -and what will we become now that the conventional clichés of hostility have been swept away?
He gives us a past defined by Before the Fali and After the Fali, and the Fali was the unmasking of the master traitor Bili Haydon.
He gives us a future perhaps equally dangerous, waiting to be written.
The questions are posed, in part, by Ned - surname unknown - whose final task in the evening of his long intelligence career is to train the new generation of men and women who will take their places as tomorrow's spies. At the passing-out dinner at the close of their training course, Ned is spurred into a sentimental journey through his own life, from recruitment to imminent retirement. The result, for the reader, is a dazzling array of recollections, part comic, part tragic, part futile - each one of them a milestone along the secret pilgrim's journey.
The questions are answered - glancingly, elusively, sometimes with a delphic ambiguity - by George Smiley, whom Ned has invited as his guest of honour for the occasion - George, the oldest and canniest Cold Warrior of them all who, having presided over Ned's career, now
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L14.95
presides over this fabled feast of memories and glittering, if deluded, future hopes.
In this book lies real magic. Subliminal magic. Magic of the moment. The magic of an awkward world haltingly accepting its singleness, and looking back on its divisions. The magic of an uncharted future beckoning to an overburdened past. To mix his magic, le Carré sprinkles a host of splendid new characters among the old knights of his own writing past: George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Bili Haydon and Ned of the Russia House among many others - each has his hour and takes his final bow in this pageant of the ever-changing, neverending secret world, which in le Carré's hands is merely the inmost room of our overt lives.
The Secret Pilgrim holds us entranced by its story-telling genius. It is John le Carré's most magnificent növel.
John le Carré was born in 1931. He received a public school education and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. Later he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a wide reputation and was followed by The Looking-Glass War, A Small Town in Germany and The Naive and Sentimental Lover. His internationally acclaimed trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, is alsó available as an omnibus, The Quest For Karla. Next came his Middle East növel, The Little Drummer Girl followed by APerfect Spy, which was a major BBC TV serial and, most recently, The Russia House. Vissza