There are moments in this book when you feel as if the 80+year-old author has defied time and remains a master of creativity. In the opening scenes describing the joint US/British covert operation on Gibraltar, the words majestically fly off the page; he describes someone as a jihadist Pimpernel - a truly brilliant characterization. I thought the book steadily went downhill along the way to what one of the two Times reviewers called its "unsurprising conclusion." One of the principals of the above mission later finds out that the operation went terribly wrong. He is a retired veteran of the Foreign Office and teams up with an up-and-coming thirty-one year old to try and find out what did happen and to expose it. The cloak and dagger set, the Foreign Office, and the Official Secrets Act all combine to make sure that doesn't happen. LeCarre takes to task the British establishment for going along with the Iraq War, leading to the inevitable comments that he has become anti-American. Author Olen Steinhauer in the other Times' review points out that that characterization of anti- Americanism would also encompass at least half of America.
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