Magnus Pym, Counsellor at the British Embassy, is hosting a dinner party at his home in Vienna when he receives an unexpected telephone call that will profoundly affect his life. Once the guests have gone, Pym breaks the news to his wife, Mary: his father, Rick, is dead. In a state of shock, he says something Mary cannot understand - 'After all these years, I'm free.' Magnus flies back to England to attend the funeral - and doesn't return. As Mary and MI6 spymaster Jack Brotherhood desperately try to find out his ...
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Magnus Pym, Counsellor at the British Embassy, is hosting a dinner party at his home in Vienna when he receives an unexpected telephone call that will profoundly affect his life. Once the guests have gone, Pym breaks the news to his wife, Mary: his father, Rick, is dead. In a state of shock, he says something Mary cannot understand - 'After all these years, I'm free.' Magnus flies back to England to attend the funeral - and doesn't return. As Mary and MI6 spymaster Jack Brotherhood desperately try to find out his whereabouts, it soon becomes clear that Pym has been keeping secrets from both his family and his employers, the British Intelligence Service. Hiding out in a remote cottage in Devon, where he goes by the name of Mr Canterbury, Magnus begins to write his memoirs - retracing his rise and fall and revealing how Rick led him step by step into a double life of deception, broken promises and betrayal... This recording, adapted from the John le Carr??? novel by Rene Basilico, was believed lost from the BBC archive, but was rediscovered after almost twenty years and restored.
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Truly absorbing on all levels, but especially on the narrator's early life - his childhood relationships and the way they form him into being, as the title names him, the perfect spy; that is someone thoroughly insecure, eager to conform to conflicting interests and socially adaptable as well as highly intelligent.
The quality of the writing is flawless; so many apt, diamond -like expressions - really on every page, so that you constantly go back to capture them. This, with the compulsive urge to move on, creates a tension of its own.
I believe this book represents le Carre at his best' It's a work of genius.
Steve S
Mar 21, 2013
Le Carre's most personal book
In an introduction to the Kindle version of this book, John Le Carre refers to this as his favorite among his books, at least until the much later CONSTANT GARDENER. In that introduction he describes his relationship with his own father, who was something of a con-man. I found the book profoundly moving.
