Product Description

From Single & Single's "tour de force opening" (Kirkus Reviews), le Carré masterfully establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. He fashions a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal syndicates in the new Russian states and the legitimate world of Western finance. He also intimately portrays two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed-and redeemed-by a son. An enthralling, multilayered tale by an author at the height of his creative powers, Single & Single is le Carré's finest novel in years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1569087 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com Review
On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.

The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls "the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East." In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations--illegal drugs--and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, "Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally."

Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog--why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world.

Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
Le Carr? reads his new thriller with the voice of a master of the genre, gamely throwing himself into long passages of the dialogue-driven plot. He jumps right into the complex story, set in locations that shift back and forth from Turkey to England, with little set-up explanation. The sense of atmosphere is rich, the polished, descriptive scenes exquisite. However, perhaps due to the abridgment process, a listener is left playing catch-up throughout the tape, struggling to discern what's really going on with the characters. At heart, this is a story of a struggle between father and son, shadowy financier Tiger Single and children's magician Oliver Hawthorne. Tiger has deserted the family to consort with Russian mobsters, and Oliver, having betrayed his father once, now must fight to save his life. They're joined by a complex financial thread that provides the central framework for the international intrigue propelling the action. As audio, the listening experience is frustrating because the material sounds so wonderful, yet it's difficult to keep a grip on what's happening. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. (Mar.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Orlov brothers, black marketeers in the chaos of the new Russia, take a dim view of being betrayed by their money-laundering British bank, Single & Single. In this story's stunning opening scene, they express their dismay by shooting one of the bank's employees and sending a video of the assassination to bank president Tiger Single, who runs for his life. Tiger's son Oliver, disgusted with the Russians' greed and dismayed by his flamboyant father's immorality, had turned the Orlovs in to British customs four years earlier. Living quietly under a new identity, Oliver discovers a huge deposit has been made in his daughter's bank account, which can only mean that Tiger has located him. Finding that his father is in danger, Oliver searches over a good share of the world trying to save him. Veteran author le Carr? (A Small Town in Germany) has created an intricate story with some fine characterizations at its core and an enormous amount of research to make every twist plausible. Moreover, he narrates surprisingly well. If the ending seems abrupt, this is a minor shortcoming. Recommended.AJohn Hiett, Iowa City P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Don Quixote de la City of London
If you read this book expecting one of Le Carre's spy novels, you will be disappointed because although there are connections to the spy world this is not a spy novel. If you keep an open mind about what will emerge in Single & Single, you will enjoy an interesting tale of good and evil drawn through the detective genre. At its best, Single & Single is as gripping as any Le Carre book -- especially in the first few chapters. The downside is that the tawdriness of almost all the characters make the book a bit of a downer. The Cold War stories in Le Carre's earlier books had the redeeming (and sometimes inspiring) quality of addressing more kinds of potential nobility. The hero in Single & Single is a rewardingly complex figure, righteous yet not always strong enough and conflicted . . . and more than a little idealistic, reminding one of Don Quixote. If you like heros like that, you will very much enjoy the book. If you find small-minded crooks pursuing their ends in petty, immoral ways relatively uninteresting, you will meet a lot of them here. I found myself mixing the crooks up in many cases because they seemed so similar in motivation and characterization. Perhaps the best part of the book is the subtle exploration of a son's feelings for a father, even when that father doesn't really add up to a lot. Although far from his best work (probably because of the subject rather than his writing skill), this Le Carre will satisfy all but the most demanding fans. Those who will be disappointed will include those who want a startling revelation at the end. That's not the way this story is constructed. It would be a mistake not to read it, however, if you are a Le Carre fan or just like a good story.

A compelling read but far from his best.
After the utter disappointment of The Tailor of Panama, Le Carre's latest novel harks back to his crafty old ways. His writing is superb, particularly in the treatment of the father-son relationship and he knows the way around scenes of physical and psychological tension better than any other author I know. The opening chapters are brilliant and his ability to put together a seemingly complex puzzle is still in top form, albeit with somewhat less shine than in his early masterpieces set during the Cold War. However, this outing is deceptively timid by comparison. The plot, when revealed, is simple and contains no surprises. We know who's the crook from the start, don't we? The approach to the climax is indeed rushed and the big bang one hopes for fails to materialise. Despite these flaws, it's still a very good read and I'm glad to see Le Carre regaining some of the lustre that made him, in my opinion, the best and classiest espionage author of his generation.

After the fall
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Le Carre wrote magnificent spy stories. Then the wall fell, and what was he to do? He takes up writing stories about international drug and arms dealers, and pharmaceutical cartels,and tricks them out with all the midnight meetings of the Home Office mandarins,and their ilk, that he previously wrote so well about, but in the case of international drug-arms smugglers, it's definitely the mountains laboring to bring forth a mouse.

Single and Single, unfortunately, follows the same pattern, though there's also some patter about smuggling blood, perhaps based in research. Her Majesty's Customs Service is all over the story, safe houses, hard men, smart beautiful talented women from Glasgow, and all. It's hard to believe in such a proactive bureacracy in hidebound Britain, aside, of course, from the fabled MI5 of LeCarre's good old days. The obligatory love interest strains credulity: I can't recall ever seeing such an extraordinary female customs employee at any British airport; and we're given precious little indication of what such a woman might see in Oliver Single. The book does begin, at least, with a bang,set on a mountainside in Turkey, it's one of LeCarre's more powerful openings. And the central conflict, between Oliver Single, and his rogue Dad, Tiger Single (thus Single and Single), has some credibility and resonance:Le Carre has let it be known that his own father was a rogue,and a con man.