We had a huge turnout – eleven people, possibly a record! – at Nice Guys to talk about our book this month, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carré. It was a very nice evening to be sitting out the front chatting although it did get a bit noisy with the ambient noise from the street and eleven chatting mouths.
Me, I didn't care for the book very much. I thought the characters all felt like paper cut outs, not fully fleshed people. There was very little interaction with the sole female character and the whole story just seemed to be telegraphed well in advance. I thought that there were some nice bits of writing and in particular there were long stretches of dialogue during the trial toward the end of the book which I thought were really nicely done.
As we discussed the book, I started to get a different perspective on the book, that it was written during a very different time when the cold war was still very real, the wall was yet to come down and the role of spies would have been much more important and held a lot more intrigue.
It was interesting to consider the book in the light of Stasiland by Anna Funder which we read some time ago. The picture it painted was of a much more sympathetic East Germany dominated by the government's iron-fisted need to monitor the population's every thought and movement. Le Carré's spies seem utterly self-involved, monitoring each other for little other reason than that was they were doing to us.
We made a remarkably quick choice for the next book which is Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. See you at Nice Guys on March 6.
