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ABSOLUTE_FRIENDS
November 17, 2017
"Absolute Friends" (2003)
John le Carre
Spoliers ahead, but not quite yet.
I liked this book quite a bit, for all DANGERBABY
that it seems like a "conventional" le
Carre story throughout much of it's
length. The main character drifts into
the orbit of an anarchist squat in West
Berlin as a young man, he later falls into
the role of a double-agent, working for
England, acting as a courier to East Dangerbaby suggests I'm groping
Berlin... throughout he evinces that for the word "amoral", but
curious shapeless quality that le Carre that's not quite it: someone
seems fascinated by. He's a man without like this *might* be amoral,
much of a center, who lacks any conviction but this character is not.
(and certainly has little ideology to Rather, what morality he has is
speak of), yet he keeps blundering into instinctive, perhaps personal.
the center of extreme political events.
When hanging around with the
anarchist revolutionaries
of 1960s West Germany he's
on the side of non-violence,
though the more radical
radicals certainly have some
logical arguments on their
side: "A terrorist has a bomb,
but no airplane."
SPOILERS
There's an undercurrent to this story... the
main character has a very interesting life,
really, there's much he could brag about,
but he never does: he appears to regard it all
as very mundane to himself, and nothing much
worth talking about, even if it were purdent to
do so (and it often at least seems that it is
not... though he might've been better off if
he had?). There's a British false modesty
lurking here, I think...
His life is remarkably exotic in many ways: growing
up in India/Pakistan, then England; living in an
anarchist squat and getting beaten by West German
police and ejected from the country; returning to
repeatedly travel between West and East in a
cultural ambassador role that morphs into being a
British spy--
He lands with a gorgeous lesbian babe in the
anarchist squat, the one they all swore was
unapproachable by men-- later, she goes
straight, becomes a lawyer, and eventually gets
rich and sends him a note about how she wants to
divorce her husband and shack up with him again
because the sex was so hot. He ignores her
disdainfully.
His wife drifts away from him, his marriage
falls apart-- but ah, if only she knew his
*true* nature. Too bad he's too steady and
reliable to let it slip.
This is all played up as quiet
tragedy, but isn't there a very
flattering aspect to it all?
Then we get near present-day times,
and our hero gets roped-in to the
third phrase in his underground
political life.
He's put in touch with a crazy rich man
who wants to put up crazy amounts of
money to rescue his language school
business from bankruptcy. The rich dude
tells a remarkably thin story about
wanting to found a "Counter- University"
to do political re-education for the The main thing he
masses-- our hero suspects him much, but does with the money
goes along for the sake of the is have some
much-needed cash... extensive dental
work done on his
There are some very good bits, as our hero common law wife, an
tries to look the gift horse in the mouth arabic woman with a
and inspect the walls of the rabbit hole small child he likes
he's fallen down (looking for snakes in to play with.
the grass, and sand-pits in the metaphors).
He tries to investigate the environs of his meeting
with the rich dude, finds himself arrested by
Austrian police... and then interviewed by a man he
knew as a CIA agent during his British intelligence
days. The CIA dude provides dire warnings about
what's going on, and requests our hero continue on
for the sake of The Cause (which, post-911 has now
become islamic terrorists, by the way).
Our hero decides the right thing to do is to use
his old emergency contact number, and call in his
old handler in British intelligence...
But his handler is just as bewildered, perhaps
more so than our hero, and is somewhat angrily
just following his mysterious orders, instructing
our hero to plunge straight ahead. He has no idea
what's going on with the CIA dude-- who is by the
way now *ex* CIA, it's a little difficult to say
precisely who he's working for. Neither does the
handler know much about the crazy rich dude, and
whether he's really got islamic terrorist
connections or what.
Near the end of the interview, the handler tosses
out an idea that it could be that the ex-CIA guy
and the crazy rich guy are only pretending to be in
opposition to each other...
And that's actually a beautifully
disorienting bit, there's this sudden
sense that the quicksand under your feet
is even goopier than you thought.
Where this is all going, however--
and here's the most highly spoiled
spoiler of all-- is that our hero
and his friend are being set-up as
patsies in a phoney Terrorist School,
a false flag operation to give our
brave US-led antiterrorist operatives
a well deserved success, and perhaps
to nudge Germany into the US-coalition.
This is a 2003 novel:
Playing up to the AN_INCONTINENT_TRUTH
9/11 truthies?
Anyone who knows anything about
le Carre the man knows he regards
himself as a professional liar (first
as a spy, then as a fiction writer),
having inherited the knack from his
con-artist father...
But we're supposed to presume he's leveling
with us now, writing authentic tales from
the intelligence underworld...
But is there any reason to take him at face
value? Couldn't it be that he's playing us?
Pandering to a popular conspiracy theory to
sell some books...
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