Underneath the grand, stately textures and rich, ironic nuances (which make this new, non-Smiley le Carre novel superior reading), there's a surprisingly conventional thriller-romance here—something of a step backward, perhaps, from the originality and moral/psychological delicacy of the Smiley-Karla trilogy. A Smiley-ish Israeli spymaster, Schulmann, a.k.a. Kurtz, is determined to flush out the Palestinian mastermind behind terrorist bombings in Europe. (Shrewdly, if sentimentally, le Carre makes Kurtz an anti-Begin sort of Israeli, hoping to prevent military action by eliminating terrorism more economically.) His plan? The traditional one: to infiltrate the Palestinian network with an agent who'll lead the Israelis to mastermind Khalil. But the way in which Kurtz accomplishes this infiltration is oblique, circuitous, quintessential le Carre: Kurtz secretly abducts Khalil's younger terrorist-brother Salim; handsome, troubled Israeli agent Becker quasi-seduces a young, leftist English actress on vacation in Greece, Charmian, a.k.a. "Charlie the Red." And, once the reluctant Charlie agrees (for not-entirely-convincing reasons) to be an Israeli agent, evidence of an England/Greece love-affair between Salim and Charlie is elaborately, painstakingly fabricated—love-letters, hotel-rooms, etc.—while Charlie gets deeply into her political, passionate role by playing out the love-story, with Becker (whom she does truly love, though he remains sexually aloof) as Salim. Thus, when Salim dies in an Israeli-staged car-crash, his comrades find the planted evidence and naturally seek out his grieving girlfriend, who may Know Too Much: with such credentials Charlie will become an almost-trusted terror recruit (spending devastating time in a Lebanon refugee camp). . . and will eventually be ready to get a bomb-assignment from Khalil in Europe, setting him up for Israel's assassins. Unfortunately, Charlie herself, for all the elegant prose and smart dialogue that le Carre lavishes on her, is never quite believable in her wavering political loyalties, her role-playing confusions; throughout, in fact, le Carre's narrative craft occasionally seems hamstrung by his determination to be fully fair to both sides of the Mideast terror. And the finale, with its strong-but-ordinary showdown and patly romantic fadeout, is faintly disappointing. Still, though a bit tenuous (and even, in the Charlie/Becker playlets, a trifle dull) by le Carre standards, this is clearly, compellingly, the work of one of today's few great storytellers—from its spacious yet tugging narration (a modern equivalent of Dickens) to its edge-of-your-seat interrogations and confrontations. So Smiley followers may be in for a slight let-down, but they—and others—will want to read every word nonetheless.
Pub Date: March 1, 1982
ISBN: 0743464656
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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