Absolute Friends

The end of the Cold War stalled the career of many espionage novelists, and although John le Carr seemed to lack direction for a time, it is he, more than any of his contemporaries, who has triumphantly found fertile new areas for his skills, and (once again) a new le Carr book is an event. Absolute Friends is a masterly novel spanning over 50 years, and is a fascinating chronicle of the modern era. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born in a newly-independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German pastor who has sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in the riot-torn West Berlin of the late Sixties, again in the era of Cold War espionage and, finally, in today's world of terror and counter-terror; le Carr 's new novel delivers the kind of non-pareil writing that has been his trademark since the early books.