While off work while home watching Sienna I picked up a few novels to spend the waking hours- and was fortunate to pick up one novel, Absolute Friends by John LeCarre that I think is truly top notch. While I've always enjoyed watching spy movies (Bond, Ronin, The Good Shepard) I haven't read much spy fiction and evidently LeCarre is the grandmaster of the genre. He wrote the classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and as well as the novel for a movie I also enjoyed named the Constant Gardner.
What had me on the seat of my pants with Absolute Friends, which is a story of two friends who go from escapades in Cold War Berlin to pawns in our War on Terror age, was the way he wove a compelling story around characters that are intelligent and intellectual while also active in the spy trade. Your average Bond movie doesn't mix Adorno, Marcuse, and microfilm into the same page but somehow LeCarre pulls it all together. Plus, he offers a stirring contemporary indictment of Pax Americana realities in the context of the New Great Game which you don't see coming until it blows open the story. End result is I finished the book and picked up his latest novel, The Mission Song, later the same day.
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