John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy ***

By consensus (including the author himself), A Perfect Spy is Le Carré's greatest novel. I beg to differ. I can see why people admire it, for its attention to a developing character, and I can certainly see why Le Carré is fond of it, for its autobiographical sketch of his father. However, I found Magnus Pym to be too passive a character and the double-agent espionage to be too blatant to be believable. I also found the prose of Pym's autobiographical sections to be too self-consciously literary. And too long -- I think Le Carré was working out his feelings about his father on the page. I would trade some of the details of Pym's adolescence for a deeper portrait of his wife Mary.

There's good stuff in here, to be sure, but I can't agree that this is Le Carré's best.