Saturday 20th August
I have just finished the latest John Le Carre, “Our kind of Traitor”. Well, to tell the truth, although he is a consummate writer, and can conjure up characters and plots with ease, I was left disappointed by it all. And it had started off so brightly, very cleverly, being told almost backwards was intriguing. But about three quarters of the way in it just seemed to get too bogged down for its’ own good. And the ending was nothing less than awful. I really don’t mind the habit of certain modern novelists to leave things hanging a bit. Supply your own ending if you like, sort of thing. Or the false ending, which you can see through, and realise that that isn’t the ending at all; you have to go back a few pages to see what the author was really letting you know, I can admire that sort of cleverness. But this ending just left me high and dry, without a clue as to why. Or actually far too many clues, far too many possibilities to actually care. And now I realise that although the story was well told (you can at least rely on Le Carre for that) I hadn’t been caring for the characters at all. I had started off caring, but somehow he lost me. And there were too many unresolved issues, too many characters that you were left wondering about, and especially the one character (or two if you count the man) who were not part of Le Carre’s brilliantly imagined underworld of spies and criminals, who were ordinary people who had somehow blundered into this murky world. Where did they go from here? And just as importantly where did I, as reader, go from here. Well nowhere I am afraid, and I might just be a bit more circumspect before I buy his next one.
Next up, if you are interested is “The Eustace Diamonds” by that most wonderful of Victorian novelists Anthony Trollope.