Product Description

Magnus Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a secret agent.



Pym’s life, it is revealed, is entirely made up of secrets.



Dominated by a father who is also a confidence trickster on an epic scale, Pym has from the age of seventeen been controlled by two mentors. It is these two, racing each other and time itself, who are orchestrating the search to find the perfect

spy ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13871 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Sunday Times
‘Without doubt his masterpiece . . . a perfect work of fiction’

Review

‘Without doubt his masterpiece . . . a perfect work of fiction’

‘The best English novel since the war’

Los Angeles Times
‘Le Carré’s best book, one of the enduring peaks of imaginative literature in our time’

Customer Reviews

A good book that needed a better editor to be a great one
The first and most important thing to remember about this book is that it is a semi-autobiography. The background, schooling and parents of the main character of this book are all Le Carre's own, with just the slightest veneer placed over them, and I do mean the slightest. Like Magnus Pym, the main character in this book, Le Carre, for example did have a father who was a crook; his father did fight a by-election in Norfolk under the Liberal colours and was, during it, exposed by an elderly Irishwoman; he did have to leave Eton when his father could no longer afford the fees.

And like Magnus Pym, Le Carre was recruited into MI6 and probably, like Pym, was recruited while studying in Bern, although unlike Pym he left after five years to write novels. However, for anyone who knows a little of Le Carre's life story, an added frisson is added by the questions that inevitably provokes - did Le Carre get up to anything naughty with Eastern Bloc intelligence services? Unlikely, but amusing to ponder.

However, the spy stuff, as beautifully crafted as it always is, is only a backdrop for the real theme of the book - Le Carre's relationship with himself, his father and his country.

Yes, his country; this is as much an elegy for the English upper-middle class as anything else. A melancholy, fatalistic patriotism seeps through every page of the book, as Le Carre writes an elegy for his people - perhaps patriotism isn't quite the write word; he has no feeling for nor interest in the St. George's flag waving, football supporting masses. It's an elegy not for England, but for his England, of `sound' men in tweeds and pipes emerging from Southern country towns to rule colonies; of the respectable sadism of the public school; of the sense of duty of a military class that has all but disappeared. The theme of fallen empire runs through all Le Carre's works, but nowhere more strongly than through this one and does so with characteristic brilliance.

With regards to his father and himself, he says what he may not have been able to say for decades, even to himself, before, and his writing bursts forth in great, emotional, torrents. Some of it moving and powerful; some of it is unnecessary but quirkily interesting; and some of it, frankly, is twaddle that needed a good editor to batter into shape. But this was Le Carre's magnum opus, and bestselling authors are allowed a little latitude in their magna opera. That's a pity, because this could have been a great book; but at times it takes a chapter to say what a sentence should have; and at times it is so hopelessly self-indulgent that it sends one to sleep.

A Tangle of Loyalties
Every once and a while one reads a work of fiction that transcends the conventional to such an extent that words of praise fail to do it justice. John Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" is one of these.

The character of Magnus Pym, the narrator, is beautifully delineated. The author, in fact, depicts an anatomy of betrayal, as he draws us, his readers, inexorably into his antihero's tangled thoughts. Consequently, we experience the alternating intensity and detachment of Pym's emotions as the narrative switches--sometimes in mid-sentence--from first to third person.

In the introduction, Le Carre confesses that he has based the characters of Magnus Pym and his con-man father, Rick, on events of his own life. This, and the fact that the author, as is well known, is a former officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service (not, however, a double agent), is undoubtedly a reason why the narrative rings so true.

Magnus Pym seems to embody Everyspy. The novel could, in fact, as easily have been based upon the life of Kim Philby, Cambridge graduate and Soviet mole in SIS during WWII and the beginning of the Cold War. Also the son of a dodgy father, who was interned for a year by the British at the beginning of the Second World War, Kim Philby--like Magnus Pym--was all things to all men, both British and Soviet. Like Pym, Philby experienced the conflicts of loyalties and crises of emotion that constitute occupational hazards in the life of a double agent. Unlike Pym, however (undoubtedly to the regret of British Intelligence), Philby did not resolve his dilemma to the satisfaction of most of the parties concerned.

In praising this book, it is so easy to fall into platitudes, which cannot begin to capture the engrossing power of "A Perfect Spy,"a novel that is guaranteed to enthrall the discerning reader from the first page until the last.

Le Carre's Masterpiece
"Love is whatever you can still betray... Betrayal is a repititious trade." (from: A Perfect Spy)

Concentrating on his signature themes of love and deceit, Le Carre gives us what is perhaps the definitive account of the psychology of betrayal. Following the death of his father, the disturbed and grieving spy Magnus Pym withdraws from the world and begins a series of reflections on his life while his wife and spymasters frantically try to find him. The 'public' action of this search, and the personalities of those conducting it not only provide an effective foil for the intensely personal and sometimes dark nature of Pym's inner search, it also amplifies the moral theme of the book--that there is no clear line between good and bad, and that our best intentions are no guarantee of goodness--especially when there are secrets involved.

Le Carre spent a long time honing his voice for this powerful novel. His writing in the decade or so before this book was published (in 1986) displays the trademark qualities of detail and subtlety that a cold war spy needed, and Le Carre's spare prose mirrors the Machiavellian cold war game his stories centre around. In this work--strongly influenced by the real-life death of his father--he reached the height of his powers. On top of his renowned ability to make highly technical plots gripping, Le Carre adds a new quality--the wistful--and it works as well as in anything by Graham Greene--another gimlet-eyed writer who had connections with the spying trade. Le Carre packs more feeling into this work than in all his other novels put together and the effect is both disturbing and intensely moving. Pym is sententious and elegant in his reveries, and his Hamlet-like angst stays with us, provoking difficult questions, long after the book is closed.

A perfect Spy is not a happy tale. The description of the young Pym and his father playing football along a Dorset beach "from one end of the world to the other" is a rare moment of joy that is nevertheless saturated in pathos--for we know that Pym's dissolute father will spoil the moment yet again soon.

Several of Le Carre's previous novels (Small Town in Germany, The Spy who Came in from the Cold, and especially the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trilogy) are examples of fine literature that just happen to centre around the world of espionage, but since 1980 he has also dropped some Desmond Bagley-ish shoot-em-ups into the mix too, which, although well crafted, rather let his literary reputation down. A Perfect Spy is a first class novel (one reviewer described it as one of the best British novels since the war) and in my opinion remains his finest.