The Old Kingdom Trilogy by Garth Nix

Review by Cas from Only 2rs

I’ve not been reading a lot of fantasy lately, but I was prodded into reading The Old Kingdom Trilogy by Garth Nix by my sister, and I’m enthralled. Sabriel, the first of the three was originally written as a stand alone novel, and I was impressed that when Nix came to write the other two books (which are really one very large book split in two) he didn’t just think of something else to have happen to the Sabriel character, but moved the story on a generation so that while Sabriel is still in it, she is no longer the protagonist. Sabriel has a fairly standard coming of age/hero’s journey plot, while Lirael & Abhorsen, the other two, deal more with two characters who are misfits. Lirael desperately wants to be the one thing she cannot be, a seer, as she lacks the talent, while Sam, Sabriel’s son has been told he must inherit Sabriel’s job of Abhorsen (a sort of zombie killer) the one thing above all others that he doesn’t want.

But it’s the world building that grabbed my attention. Two lands face each other, separated by a wall. One, the Old Kingdom, once a land of powerful, but ordered magic, is now a wasteland of anarchy, while the other, Alcestierre, is a land of modernity and technology, where magic doesn’t work, and is only believed in on the borders with the Old Kingdom. The two are separated by a wall imbued with powerful magic, which made me think at one level of Hadrian’s Wall, separating the order of the Roman province of Britannia from the anarchy of Celtic Caledonia. (and I see from an interview with Nix that this was indeed one of the original inspirations for the wall) The army of Alcestierre guard the wall with First World War level technology. They have trenches and barbed wire and primitive tanks, but because at times of greatest danger their technology stops working they also have swords and mail armour and some of them are trained mages. Needless to say they also have idiotic generals in the rear who don’t believe in magic and cause all sorts of problems because of this. I like that Nix didn’t choose to make Alcestierre completely modern, but at the same time recognisable.

The power that holds the Old Kingdom together is imbued in three bloodlines and I’ve read at least one review where the writer felt this was a very conservative message, but I don’t know that this is necessarily the case. There is nothing in the books to suggest that with perseverance and diligence, anyone can’t become a powerful magic user. All they say is that to do certain things, you have to have inherited the talent, which seems par for the course to me.
 
The novels are well written, with excellent characterisation and page turning plots. They are marketed as Young Adult, but they are in no way lightweight novels – metaphorically or in actuality they’re not short books. Younger children may find the themes of death disturbing.
 
Finally, I was most impressed by the production values of the covers. You can’t see it in the illustrations but they have charter marks (the runes that are the source of the magic in the novels) embossed on them. 

Anyway, check these out if you can – they’re well worth it.

 

The Price of Silence – Kate Wilhelm

For a hard-working genre writer, it pays to mix things up a little. Kate Wilhelm tends to intersperse her Barbara Holloway legal thrillers with mystery stories of a different ilk. Still there are commonalities. Most Wilhelm novels are set in Oregon; most feature a female protagonist who turns out to be stronger than she looks.

In The Price of Silence Todd Fielding arrives in the small town of Brindle, Oregon, to take on the task of editing the local newspaper, which is in a sorry state. Todd’s husband continues his PhD studies at the nearby university town, and for several days a week, Todd is alone in their rented house.

Meanwhile, the newspaper proprietor, the ageing Ruth Ann Colonna, plans a special edition celebrating the history of Brindle.

Except there doesn’t seem to be much to celebrate. In fact, Brindle appears to be a town built on lies, fraud, deception, murder, and worse. More than that, Todd starts to suspect that something has been happening to Brindle’s children for too many years: there are at least five young girls missing in similar circumstances, but nobody wants to talk about it or investigate their disappearance.

There’s no fat on this. The main characters are well-drawn, and the plot keeps rolling along, and you keep turning the pages. There are Agatha Christie-like red herrings, false accusations, and all the tension you’d expect in a story featuring an outsider trying to get at the truth.

This is a solid Kate Wilhelm rather than a spectacular one. She’s done this kind of thing before, often better. It’s a fast read, and only lasted a day for me on my recent holiday. UK readers will struggle to get hold of it, unless willing to order from the States, as I did. I bought the hardback, but I’d recommend waiting for the paperback.

Prehistoric Europe: an illustrated history – Barry Cunliffe

Review by Simon Holy Hose

Last summer I got interested in standing stones in Wales. I bought a book by a local author, the conclusion of which was that basically we haven’t got the slightest idea what standing stones are for. The temptation is to put it down to whistfulness, except the effort involved in cutting the stone, dragging it across country (sometimes for hundreds of miles), and then erecting it in the middle of nowhere, would have been almost incredible.

Well that got me piqued. I wanted to see into the mind of these people if it was at all possible. That’s how I came to start reading this book, Prehistoric Europe – an illustrated history edited by Barry Cunliffe.

I finished reading it last night (started on 13th August 2005). Did I get the insight I wanted? Not much. For a start I knew that they liked carving spirals and arrows into rocks. Again nobody knows the significance of these shapes in spite of them being found throughout europe. I also knew about places being named after greyhound bitches, and they’d found traces of fish stews with frogs at burials.

This book also told me about how uninhabitable Britain has been over most of the last 100,000 years. It blew my mind that traces of humans had been found in caves dated before the last ice age: they were here, then their remains were buried in caves under miles of ice, which in turn melted away again.

I learnt how long before we had writing there was a fairly comprehensive trading network in place across which artifacts flowed between Europe, Africa, and the Far East. It even blew my mind to discover that tin was exported from Cornwall into North Wales to make bronze.

I’ve mentioned that climate change had quite a significant impact on populations. It’s all very interesting stuff.

The main problem I had is that the text of some chapters was, I think, pitched at the level of archaeology undergrad text-book, and lots of technical terms were lost on me (potzol – a type of soil formed from decomposed pine needles!!) nevertheless it underlined just how little we know about our ancestors.

Did you know that there are people able to date and locate the source of an arrowhead by its shape? Heavy work.

But a lot of the book wasn’t what I would call “pre-historic” in subject matter. It covered what was going on in the rest of Europe while the Greeks and Romans had their moment in the sun. This was also quite interesting. Everyone has heard about vandals and goths and huns, but without knowing who they were and what they did.

I particularly enjoyed reading about the Kurgans. If one of the chiefs snuffed it, then perhaps as many as a hundred of his warriors and their horses would be sacrificed and STUFFED in order to be buried with him in his mound to accompany him in the afterlife. Totally hard.

And then too, the consideration of mindset and religious change that accompanied the change from burial with gravegoods to cremation. I’d not thought about this but it is significant: it seems to suggest that a paradigm shift took place in that the physical body was no longer deemed necessary for an afterlife. In other words, they started to believe in a soul.

But most remarkable of all is the unstoppability of waves of vigorous and opportunistic peoples from the East. It happened repeatedly, and even the Romans who had conquered most of the world were ultimately swamped and overcome by them. Strength does indeed lie in numbers.

City of Pearl; Crossing the Line; The World Before – Karen Traviss

Following my bulk-purchase of the Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Retrieval Artist" series, Amazon kindly recommended that I purchyase City of Pearl by British writer Karen Travis. (Don't read that top reader review, because it's full of bleedin' spoilers!) And, believe it or not, it's great, and I'm dead chuffed.

Like the Retrieval Artist novels, City of Pearl is set in the future (23rd century), and it involves religion and awkward relations with alien cultures and the things you are – and aren't – allowed to do on a planet not your own. There are also brilliant glimpses of the kind of future we might all have – if we continue to allow big chemical companies to stick copyright notices on the building blocks of life. Imagine, for example, a future in which all food crops are genetically modified and copyright. How does your garden grow?

(And how typical of the news media that serves us so badly that they tend to focus on the "Frankenstein"/contamination aspects of GM food and not the real reason these companies pursue it.)
A group of Christian colonists have set off to Cavanagh's star, sending a single message back to Earth: don't follow. It's assumed they've been lost, but then Shan Frankland is appointed to lead a small expeditionary force on a 150-year round trip… to do what? The key plot device here is that Frankland is confidentially briefed using smart drugs that only release information into her head piecemeal, so she actually doesn't know her mission, just that she freely agreed to it.

She spends her time with things "on the tip of her tongue", as it were, the information just not within reach of her conscious mind. She leads a group of seven Royal Marines, seven scientists, and one journalist to a beautiful almost-Earthlike planet (less oxygen, higher gravity, longer seasons), where she finds a group of humans living an idyllic pastoral life – but dwelling underground. It turns out they're only barely tolerated by the guardians of the planet, who are quite willing to erase whole cities in order to preserve the planet's ecology.

There's lots of good stuff here about the inability of humans to think of "lower" life-forms as "people," even if they're quite intelligent. And stuff about signs and messages misread, misunderstood, or not even recognised as messages. All science fiction is about the time in which it is written, whether or not it's set in the future, and it's clear that the post-2001 SF about the fate of a standard set of – problematic term : Western – values in the face of peoples who see the world through quite different filters (the metaphor here is of aliens who can see colours in what we see as clear glass) is very interesting indeed.

One of the most boring aspects of Science Fiction as it is filmed – for movies or TV – is the knee-jerk assumption that humanity is in the right. I'm so bored of the "threat to Earth" theme that it spoils my enjoyment. The greatest weakness of any SF film or TV programme is the production assumption that the audience will not be engaged unless somehow Earth and/or humanity is under threat. As such, there are never any of the real joys of SF – the creation of wonder, or the evocation of the completely alien viewpoint.

This is just one of the reasons to love Karen Traviss' City of Pearl and its sequels. Because although there are a handful of sympathetic human characters, the people you're rooting for are the aliens who are trying to deal with the peculiarly skewed morality of the humans they encounter.

This first sequel, Crossing the Line carries on the story where it left off, with former police officer Shan Frankland learning to cope with her new status as a carrier of an alien parasite that keeps her alive with miraculous healing powers, but also alters her DNA on a whim. Shan sets up house with Aras, an alien who also carries the parasite, and they begin to deal with the politics of an alien society and the strained diplomatic relations with humans and other species, and the questions raised by disputed territory and a fragile but intelligent water-based species that cannot defend itself.

The issues are both environmental protection and interspecies morality, as incompatible cultures interact. This is a well-paced genre piece that highlights – for example – the horror of a vegetarian species (who consider all creatures to be "people" – intelligent or not) when they encounter meat eaters.

More importantly, it's a cracking story with the ultimate heroine: Shan Frankland, a woman who is prepared to make huge sacrifices yet expects and receives no recognition. In City of Pearl Aras executes a human scientist who dissects an alien child (one of the protected squid-like aliens) after being specifically told not to do such a thing. In Crossing the Line the stakes are raised even higher, as some of the humans commit horrifying acts which both beggar belief and have the sad ring of familiarity.

The inevitable escalation is superbly told, and the climax is both shocking and exciting, setting up the next sequel, The World Before. I've mentioned before that Traviss hasn't got a British publisher, a ridiculous situation, but thank goodness that the internet makes that kind of distinction kind of irrelevant. It's true she writes American-style SF, but she does so in a distinctly British voice, which makes for a refreshing read. Spot on!

The third in her series set on or around Bezer'ej, The World Before continues where Crossing the Line left off. Rather than feeling like a satisfying conclusion to a trilogy, this feels like a marker on the way to somewhere else, and there are indeed at least two further sequels to follow.

It's difficult to say much about a 3rd in a series without spoiling earlier episodes, but suffice it to say that for those who have read this far, there are twists to the story that keep it getting more interesting.

For example, the humans who encounter the main aliens here, the Wess'har, learn to fear them because of their extremely strict environmental policies and their view that all beings have a right to exist without interference from others. In such a context, the proliferation of humans – even on their own planet – at the expense of other life-forms and the biosphere – comes to seem like an out-of-control infestation.

But it turns out that these Wess'har are a colony of softy liberal pacifist hippy environmentalists who left their home planet thousands of years before because they wanted to have even less impact on their environment than was culturally acceptable back home. The World Before, the place they come from, holds even more mystery, and needless to say, the home planet Wess'har turn up in this episode and seem determined to deal with the human threat by any means necessary.

There's a lovely moment in this when a Wess'har scientist resurrects a pair of parrots from a gene bank and finds them not only beautiful, but intelligent enough to learn speech. Now, think of the way parrots get treated and threatened and exploited in this wonderful world of ours and imagine what the Wess'har might think of us!

The question at issue here is actions vs. motivations. We all know about the Road to Hell, but the humans here encounter a species that doesn't care what you thought you were doing or what you wanted to happen. They make judgements based on actions and their consequences alone. There's no such thing as an accident, or collateral damage that is somehow excusable: you are responsible for your actions. Another cracking read from Traviss, and can't wait for the next instalment.

Declare – Tim Powers

While I'm in an espionage frame of mind, this is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. While I've mentioned Tim Powers often, I've not actually done full-blown reviews of many of his books.

He's got a new novel due out some time this year (fingers crossed) called Three Days To Never, but his previous full-length outing was Declare, which more than anything is what started me reading both fact and fiction about espionage, a throwback to my PhD studies, when I read Mailer's Harlot's Ghost as well as Oswald's Tale.

Lee Harvey Oswald (triple-named in notoriety, as Delillo says in Libra), so it goes, was an agent, an informer. He had his handler. In my review below I mention how events in Le Carré's Absolute Friends are manipulated by an unnamed agency so as to give the appearance that a terrorist plot has been foiled. But the two dead terrorists found at the scene are, in fact, just patsies. "I'm a patsy," was how Oswald declared his innocence following his arrest for the assassination of Kennedy.

The key thing about characters like Oswald (in fiction at least) and Mundy is that they exist in a state of semi-bewliderment, not really clear on the background, the basics, but along for the ride nevertheless. The more you read about espionage, the more believeable it comes to seem that Oswald was a patsy.

Being along for the ride, playing along for a peaceful life: I think we've all been there. You have a veggie girlfriend or boyfriend, so you're a veggie while it lasts. But you're not really. You're not an ideologue, just a passenger on someone else's ideology.

This is how Andrew Hale, the hero of Tim Powers' Declare, exists. He's a classic Le Carré hero, who ends up working in espionage by default, because someone leads him to it, and he joins in the heyday – pre World War 2, when the whole thing was run by gentlemen scholars and amateurs. Hale's recruitment could almost be a carbon copy of Smiley's, or Mundy's, except for the little twist that Powers gives the story. He learns how to act, not because he understands what he's doing, but by rote: learns to react to certain cues, the instructions given by wire, by anonymous voices over the telephone: "Here is a list…"

Powers operates like this: an historical event, something everyone knows a little bit about, is examined closely for anomalous details. Powers takes these anomalies, small mysteries at the heart of events (like: what motivates people to act as they do?), and supplies the explanation: which is usually of a supernatural or fantastic nature. Everything remains internally consistent with the external facts.

So. For example, Hale is taken to the headquarters of the amateur spy organisation, the pre-war SIS, and led up a complex series of passageways and staircases to an office. Whereas we've all wandered in a bewildered way around office complexes sploodged into old buildings, Powers helpfully supplies all the strange details: just this number of exact turns, counterclockwise, just one window facing in this particular direction, and do go back in the exact opposite way you came in.

Hale, it turns out, has a destiny, a unique ability, an accident of his birth, but this orphaned son of a troubled mother doesn't know it yet. Declare covers some familiar locations and events: Paris during the Nazi occupation; Berlin in the Cold War; the Middle East; Philby, Burgess, T E Lawrence; the fall of the Soviet Union.

We were just reading about this in Absolute Friends. The fall of the Soviet Union: why? Why so sudden? Le Carré describes events; Powers offers a supernatural explanation.

Following his recruitment, Hale is sent to Paris, where he lives undercover, working with a small radio receiver, picking up and decoding messages, passing them on. He doesn't know what's going on, but somehow he's gifted, able to receive when others can't, as strange radio codes bounce off the heavyside layer. Tapping out the rhythm: in a trance, or possessed by a higher power. All the usual spy paraphernalia are here: the one-time decoding pads, the radio sets, the beautiful and mysterious Elena who assists him, who always seems to understand more than him, and who comes, perhaps, to love him.

But events drive them apart, he loses her, and doesn't know if she's alive or dead. He encounters her again, years later, in a divided Berlin, as the Communists attempt to mount some extraordinary operation. On the surface, it's tanks and soldiers, but in reality there are massive supernatural forces at work, as the djinn (or genie) that holds the Soviet Empire together is fed or appeased. In 1948, he takes place in a disastrous exercise near Mount Ararat designed to destroy a djinn, and in so doing destroy the one that protects the Soviet Empire. When it all goes horribly wrong, with most of his team killed, Hale is a broken man who returns to his books.

Philby is a constant presence. The high-profile British traitor lived under a cloud after his spy-ring colleagues defected in 1951, but he was still an actor in British intelligence until his own defection, which took place in Beirut in 1963. What happens in that year is described by Powers. As Hale, called back into service, takes part another attempt to destroy the djinn on Mt. Ararat, both Philby and Elena are present. Afterwards, Philby escapes to Moscow.

The final act in the story takes place there, in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hale is in Moscow, hoping to find Elena, hoping she remembers a rash promise they'd made each other years before. And there is Philby: the key to the Soviet Empire: when he dies (in 1988), it begins to die.

I love Declare. It's so many things rolled into one successful whole. A spy novel; a fantasy novel; a romance; a ripping yarn. The bewildered hero Hale is easy to identify with, and the implacably brave and self-sacrificing Elena is easy to love. And I love it because it mixes actual historical events and people like Philby with a fantasy plot that supplies an explanation that is in so many ways more satisfying (and believable?) than any other you might have heard. It's a dense and complex novel, too, so it's one you can read again and again with the same amount of pleasure.

Call for the Dead; The Night Manager; Absolute Friends – John Le Carré

I realise that it's somewhat of a huge undertaking to attempt a review of three Le Carré novels, but – by chance – I happen to have read these three over the past couple of weeks, and taken together, they offer an overview of his long career.

Call for the Dead was published in 1961, his first novel, and his first to feature George Smiley, later the lead character in the Le Carré novels made famous by film and TV adaptations. Smiley's People was a BBC series, wasn't it? Prime candidate for BBC4 to show again, I should say.

The Night Manager is a more mature Le Carré – late middle-period, post Cold War, published in 1991. Some say it's a Bond parody, but it also reminded me of The Bourne Identity in a lot of ways. And Absolute Friends is his most recent novel, published 2004, so not only post Cold War, but post 9/11 too.

I've hinted at the other place that Le Carré has much to say about our current situation, what leads to it, how we ended up like this, and what's (probably) going on behind the scenes.

Spy novels take you into the hall of mirrors created by espionage, the weird nether-world of flexible moral standards and nothing – ever – being quite what it seems. The texts can be dense, difficult, sometimes slow, never quite getting to the point – which is precisely the point. Even a Big Picture person will find it hard to see the bigger picture, the backdrop, the broad strokes of what is actually going on. Because the thing about espionage – and I've read enough about it over the years to know this – is that nobody ever does see the bigger picture.

The gift of a fictional spy like Smiley is to give the impression of knowing more than you do in order to learn a little bit more than you do, in an endless process of Big Picture building. Smiley is prized for his ability to think. But the Big Picture never does resolve. Even as you're adding grains down here, it's flaking apart and disintegrating over there, like a castle in the sand as the tide comes in.

This is never more clear than in Call for the Dead, Smiley's first outing, in which he is revealed as a frustrated scholar and academic who has been co-opted into intelligence in a time of dire need, and can never quite get away again, even though he would like to. The earliest intelligence operations were all run by inspired amateurs like Smiley. Call for the Dead is short, as novels could sometimes be in times past, and at under 200 pages would probably be classed as a novella these days. It's still dense, though, with much to take in, and Le Carré's style always manages the double trick of espionage – leads you both towards and away from a resolution, like a fuse lit at both ends, narrating both before and after events simultaneously, aware of a bigger picture, but never quite laying it out in an easy way for you to take in at one go.

Smiley acts on an anonymous tip, conducts an affable interview with a minor civil servant about his communist past (at University, natch), decides he's a good chap, and is shocked to discover – the next day – that's he's committed suicide. That's the bones of it, what sets the plot in motion. And Smiley/Le Carré then plays catch up, peeling off layer after layer to get to some form of the truth. It's the cold war, and he finds himself pitted against an East German spy who once worked on the side of the Allies in the second world war, who was once a student of Smiley in Germany before the war, but whom Smiley had not recruited himself, believing him to be slightly unstable, a bit too obvious and vocal, too much of a risk.

Recruited by someone else, this character – Dieter Frey – turns out of be an incredibly good agent, of great value, a miraculous survivor, and now a tricky adversary. Smiley, who only gives the appearance of knowing more than he does, is always one step behind, and only able to follow at all because Dieter is using the craft as taught to him by Smiley, more or less unmodified. You send a postcard to arrange a meeting, but the text doesn't mean anything. What matters is the picture on the front, and how you've previously agreed to interpret that.

Nobody does see the big picture, because spying is a series of small acts of betrayal committed by small men and women. An "agent" in the parlance could be anyone – you or me, an office cleaner, a keeper of the keys, a receptionist. It's not going to be some high-powered, highly-paid individual – well, almost never. We live in a society that excludes people – all the time, all over the place. And as long as people are excluded, made to feel valueless and ignored as much as possible – as long as that happens, there will be a pool of potential recruits. Part of the craft lies in the ability to identify these people. I like to think I would have been a prime candidate, in different circumstances. It's hard to think of it as betraying your country when your country treats you like shit on its shoe. And sometimes you just do it for the cash. Or for a woman/man. As fickle as romantic love is, patriotic love is more so.

The Agent reports to his or her handler, someone with whom they have a relationship, and they pass the information on to the handler, who in turn passes it on, and so on. Sitting back at head office, the analysts – civil servants of whatever grade – assess and interpret the information. And thinkers like Smiley try to see the Big Picture. Of course, it might not be the information itself but the act of obtaining the information that matters more than anything. As in Orwell, the act of betrayal is sometimes all they're after.

Conflicts can arise, and they do. The British are spying on the East Germans, who spy on the British and the Americans, and the Americans are spying on everyone, including the British. And in the aftermath of the Cold War, Le Carré posits a conflict between the forces of so-called Pure Intelligence (those who just want the small acts of betrayal to continue, who want the information but don't want to act on it) and Enforcement (those who want to go in with guns blazing and kill the motherfuckers).

You can see it happening around you. Pure Intelligence hears the chatter about 9/11 or 7/7 in the run up, but doesn't want to act on it. No prosecutions please, we're British. No, you can't use our Intelligece information in a court of law, that would be unthinkable. Then the worst happens, and the Enforcers step in and say, fuck this, we want to nail these bastards. So then the Pure Intelligence people clam up and stop passing on the information. Or they pass on misinformation. Or they sabotage things in any number of other ways. They practice the art of the double bluff.

This is essentially the story of The Night Manager. Who is the worst man in the world? In this novel it's Roper, an international arms dealer, who will sell arms to anyone, on any side. He calls it "selling farms" and he's a billionaire of course, with a private island and a retinue of minor aristocrats and paid help. And he has a "signer", a front, someone whose name heads up the list of company directors, who signs all the contracts, so that Roper himself stays in the background, untouchable.

In The Night Manager, Enforcement decide to do something about him. Pure Intelligence take a back seat, until it transpires that Roper has decided to Buy British, in part, and – more importantly – Buy American. Never mind that he's supplying arms to Colombian Cocaine cartels, there are forces in the British and American governments who will let the deal go through, because the Toys are stamped "Made in the USA."

Far fetched? You think somehow not. The Iraqi Supergun springs to mind, doesn't it? A scandal after the fact, but – also – how did Saddam get those French missiles? Oh, and according to Roper, the first Gulf war was fought – not because of oil or Kuwaiti gold – but for the experience, for practice. Think about it: you have an ageing military class, with leaders hardened in Viet Nam about to retire. Who replaces them? Who trains the next generation in the ways of fighting wars? You need a new generation of battle-hardened veterans to pass on the knowledge to the the one after that.

In other words, a war every few years is inevitable. It all makes a lot more sense when you realise that they just need the practice.

The Night Manager is Jonathan Pine, a former soldier who takes refuge from the world in the late night service economy, but events lead him to Roper – and a hatred of Roper – and he volunteers to act as an agent and take him down. So his life is unravelled to a script, his reputation sullied, and he goes on the lam, bumping into Roper in an orchestrated way and penetrating his inner circle.

Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, with betrayal heaped upon betrayal, and as a bloodless coup takes place back in in Blighty, his fake cover story is used as a pretext to abandon him to torture and death. Only one man, his handler, is willing to go to lengths to secure his safety.

Which brings us on to Absolute Friends, in which Le Carré cleverly echoes some of the aspects of Call for the Dead, with a lightweight version of Smiley (Ted Mundy) befriending a lightweight version of Dieter (Sasha). Where earlier generations of spies were radicalised at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s, this generation arises out of the events of the 60s, when student radicals in Berlin lived in squats, skipped their lectures, and marched on the streets before some of them started to justify to themselves the use of violence and terrorism. The subtle point here is about the different kinds of learning. Whereas Smiley was a real scholar with real, in-depth knowledge, able in fact to teach at a high level whilst maintaining his cover, the radicals of the 60s for the most part merely skimmed the back cover blurb of radical books and pamphlets, and looked for leaders to follow.

There comes a parting of the ways. Some of them drift into corporate life, some drift into roles as minor civil servants, some bum around the world, and others end up in Palestinian training camps, or in Beirut, or just dead. It was interesting to me, as a Critical Theorist, to see all those familiar names bandied about by Le Carré, all those names that are used by radicals to justify violence. I remember sitting in Critical Theory seminars thinking, these people (meaning my fellow students) are complete cunts, here only to reinforce their own belief in murder and mayhem, wilfully twisting the words of others to make their kind of sense. Whereas I always struggled through these texts, wondering why they used so many made-up words and avoided making any actual point, my fellow students always had that one thing they thought they knew, that bit they'd skimmed from the back cover blurb.

This level of ignorance, this kind of naivety is exploited in Absolute Friends, first to recruit Mundy and Sasha as agents in the Cold War, and later to take advantage of their idealism in order to set them up as patsies in an onion skin anti-terrorist operation that is all smoke and mirrors and ends up with a terrorist cell exposed to the media which was actually nothing of the kind. The Big Picture here is that Enforcement is still at war with Pure Intelligence and our civilisation – such as it is – is in the not very capable hands of lightweights and fanatics.

If you were to pick one of these three to read, I'd say Absolute Friends is almost certainly up there with Le Carré's best – highly recommended. If you aren't charged with some of Le Carré's obvious seething anger after reading this, then you're doing something wrong, reading it upside-down perhaps. The unravelling of Ted Mundy is surely one of the best character explorations I've ever read, and if you want to understand just a little bit of the political world we live in, packing a few Le Carrés in your suitcase before you head off on your cheap flight and have your passport checked 97,000 times is a good start.