The Russia House
– John Le Carre, 1989
Barley Blair a hard-drinking down-at-heels publisher. Purely
by a chance drunken encounter during a strip to the perestroika-era USSR, Blair
impresses Goethe, a dissident scientist that works in the weapons industry.
Goethe implies Sov weapons technology works about as well as it nuclear
industry, but that the lower levels constantly talk blue-skies to the upper
levels. The British and American spy agencies are tantalized at the prospect of
getting a live source. They press Blair to return to Russia, contact Goethe,
and pump him for more intelligence. As we would expect, Blair resents being
exploited and falls in love with a Russian woman besides. His going off the
rails is chronicled in this interesting and involved novel disguised as a spy
story.
The story is told in first person by the tame legal adviser
to British intelligence – think a bureaucrat,
ever ready to tell his superiors what they want to hear. He surveys the
nothingness of his personal life and his flight into the secret world through
Blair’s story.
This novel is good, worth reading though lacking the
compulsive draw of barn-burners such as The
Honorable Schoolboy, The Perfect Spy,
and the incredible The Night Manager.
The movie made from this book starred Sean Connery, miscast in the lead, and
Michelle Pfeiffer –meh as the female lead.
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