Recent reviews:
| The Mission Song |
| Robert McCrum, published in The Observer 24/09/2006 |
| First things first: this is John le Carre's 20th novel, the latest volume in a remarkable oeuvre that stretches back to Call for the Dead (1961) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), a modern classic set in a fictional European landscape that now seems almost as remote as the Thirty Years' War. Remarkably, a generation and several revolutions on, he remains close to the top of his game. The Wall has come down, the Evil Empire is at one with Nineveh and Tyre, but there are still dragons to slay under an alien sun. |
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| The Mission Song |
| Michael Saler, published in The Times Literary Supplement 20/09/2006 |
| In a 1977 interview, John le Carré was asked what he wanted from life. “Although it sounds pious,” he responded, “I would like to get better as a writer. I would like to . . . become perhaps more sheer, in some ways to reduce, in other ways to concentrate the scope as it were.” The Mission Song, his twentieth novel, is one of his tautest works, harking back to the lean thrillers he wrote in the early 1960s. It is a fast-paced, entertaining book, in which most of the action takes place over the course of a few days in London and on a nameless northern island. |
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| The Mission Song |
| Dan Zigmond, published in San Francisco Chronicle 15/07/2006 |
| "The Mission Song" is a marvelous return to the John le Carré of old, with all the captivating characters, finely rendered landscapes and messy complexities that have always powered his best work. One can easily imagine Bruno Salvador sitting down to lunch with George Smiley and debating the familiar question: Can we truly justify our wicked spies? |
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