John Le Carr S Post Cold War Fiction

This is an analysis of the first 10 post—Cold Warnovels of one of the most significant ethicists in contemporary fiction. This book challenges distinctions between “popular” and “serious” literature by recognizing le Carré as one of the most significant ethicists in contemporary fiction, contributing to an overdue reassessment of his literary stature. Le Carré’s ten post–Cold War novels constitute a distinctive subset of his espionage fiction in their response to the momentous changes in geopolitics that began in the 1990s. Through a close reading of these novels, Snyder traces how—amid the “War on Terror” and transnationalism—le Carré weighes what is at stake in this conflict of deeply invested ideologies.

John le Carré and the Cold War explores the historical contexts and political implications of le Carré's major Cold-War novels. The first in-depth study of le Carré this century, this book analyses his work in light of key topics in 20th-century history, including containment of Communism, decolonization, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cambridge spy-ring, the Vietnam War, the 70s oil crisis and Thatcherism. Examining The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979) and other novels, this book offers an illuminating picture of Cold-War Britain, while situating le Carré's work alongside that of George Orwell, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming. Providing a valuable contribution to contemporary understandings of both British spy fiction and post-war fiction, Toby Manning challenges the critical consensus to reveal a considerably less radical writer than is conventionally presented.

2008: A covert counterterror operation code-named Wildlife is to be mounted on the Rock of Gibraltar. This one is right off the books; the target code-named PUNTER. The Brits on land, the American mercenaries by sea. Kit Probyn, an upright Foreign Office veteran with a safe pair of hands and no previous experience of the dark arts, will be the minister’s eyes and ears on the ground. His “red telephone.” Toby Bell, a rising Foreign Office star and the minister’s personal private secretary, has been kept out of the loop. Why? There are whispers of private armies, bounty, dicey intelligence, corporate wars. 2011: A disgraced Special Forces soldier who took part in Wildlife delivers a message from the dead. The worlds of Toby Bell and Kit Probyn collide. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, at what point do these two good men become guilty bystanders?

"FURIOUS IN ACTION...TAKES US BY THE NECK ON PAGE ONE AND NEVER LETS GO." --Chicago Sun-Times With the Cold War fought and won, British spymaster Tim Cranmer accepts early retirement to rural England and a new life with his alluring young mistress Emma. But when both Emma and Cranmer's star double agent and lifelong rival, Larry Pettifer, disappear, Cranmer is suddenly on the run, searching for his brilliant protege, desperately eluding his former colleagues, in a frantic journey across Europe and into the lawless, battered landscapes of Moscow and southern Russia, to save whatever of his life he has left.... "IRRESISTIBLE...A sinuous plot, leisurely introduced, whose coils become increasingly constricting. There is crisp, intelligent dialogue, much of it riding an undercurrent of menace. And there is a hero who does not see himself as heroic but who struggles with inner demons as much as with the forces arrayed against him." --Time "AS THRILLING AS LE CARRE GETS...The novel has the heartstop duplicity of A Perfect Spy and some of the outraged honor of The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl." --The Boston Globe "GRIPPING." --The Christian Science Monitor A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Two young lovers treat themselves to a once-in-a-lifetime holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. He's an austere tutor at Oxford. She's a sparky rising London barrister. Their native Britain is floundering in debt. On the second day of their holiday they encounter a rich, charismatic 50-something Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula, wears a diamondencrusted Rolex watch, has a tattoo on the knuckle of his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. What else Dima wants is the engine that drives John le Carré's majestic, thrilling, tragic, funny, and utterly engrossing new novel of greed and corruption, from the arctic hells of the gulag archipelago to a billionaire's yacht anchored off the Adriatic Coast; to the Men's Final of the French Open tennis championships at the Roland Garros stadium; to two murky Swiss bankers dubbed Peter and the Wolf; and finally and fatally to a Swiss alpine resort nestling in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger and the story's terrifying end.

When British intelligence agent Magnus Pym disappears, two desperate searches are initiated--the hunt of agents, East and West, for the missing spy and Pym's own quest to uncover the mysteries of his own past.

The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book—his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience for its justifications. Interweaving past and present so that each tells its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters, old and new.

An absolutely triumphant bestseller Absolute Friends has been hailed everywhere as the masterpiece toward which John le Carré has been building since the fall of Communism. This thrilling tale of loyalty, betrayal, and international espionage spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and uncertain new alliances alliances that aren’t always what they seem to be.