Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290291
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
No other current author writes the modern drawing room novel with a cocktail-party cast of hundreds, and everyone covered with just the faintest unseemly sheen of sweaty tension, anticipation and intrigue.
It remains John LeCarre's forte, and if the result is often as slow and creaky as a British lift, the goal is still reached in due time despite many a jerk and pause along the way.
This time, things start in an uppity Swiss hotel where one Jonathan Pine is the night manager. It's the kind of place where the flaring of a single nostril is all the emotion that's allowed.
Pine has perfected the art of service without subservience as only a British expatriate might be expected to do. So when one Roper and entourage show up, they couldn't be more pleased with what they find. It takes a good three chapters just to sort out the hotel characters a tiny bit and to flutter things about with flashbacks that hint at Pine's far more colorful past as a British agent.
Roper, you see, is quite the villain, an arms dealer and universal corrupter who has a special score in mind. But as is the way with the intelligence world, the supposed good guys quarrel among themselves as to whether to take Roper out or to let him play out his string to see where it leads. The result is problems a-plenty for Pine.
LeCarre's novels have both allegorical and theological themes, and dark and gloomy ones they are. The sins are pride and lust and greed to name just three. "Everything God's got, Roper's got to have two of, and it'll be the undoing of him," one character says early on.
A few pages later, however, another aside hints that even if God is to blame for it all, things may yet work out: "When God finished putting together Dickey Roper, He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance."
Balance, indeed.
It's a brutal business before all the scales are set. John LeCarre turns the wheels of his story one groaning syllable at a time. It's not light reading and it's not quick reading, and if when you've finished you feel that you may have lost a pound of painful flesh in the process, then that's probably just the way LeCarre intended it.
\ Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB