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Cornwell
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TTS
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David Cornwell & TTSS "Maybe,I don't know, I think not, Once"TinkerTailor Soldier SpyJohn le Carre (DCornwell)Long regarded by even the most anti-Carre as one of the betetr espionage thrillers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Intellectual, clerical, even, in nature, as a novel. I have spent a reading youth in the pages of what Elliot described as the "wilderness of mirrors" and I can say that I have read three books that were comparable to TTSS. Herein lies the wonder and joy of TTSS: those three books were in a spy pentateuch that came out, as a collection, around 1955. The individual thrillers were published in the first half of the twentieth century. So. The cream of one genre from one block of less than six contiguous decades is usually an acceptable indictment of the genre itself, the novel and the fears/hopes-of-the-time factor. TTSS rests head and shoulders above almost every other idea in the spy thriller world from the latter half of this century."The seminal Cold War masterthriller" would be printed on a foundation of truth if you read it on one of the myriad reprints that will resurface for all of the poor souls that didn't even like to read before they saw the upcoming (at least US release) TTSS talkie. Carre is a known quantity... he is smart enough to never admit to fancying himself a salted spy, although he was schooled, trained and briefly worked as one. He is a man of thoughts awash in his own evident and tragic mortality and thus helplessness. He is a '68er who is a student of history: this allows him to at once love and hate all that is America, Britain and the misaptly named 'Western Society' in general. Charmingly, he cannot revile the exotic, whether in folk, creed or land.His whinings resonate with the left...his honesty in relating realities thrums soothingly with the right, and all can sit around the boma with fire-warmed shins and make the clinkety scotch compromise becuase you know old John would join you were he as base a man as you (which by his own admission he ardently is). His writing is at least unique, at most brilliant. He'll ramble you for a few pages, wasting your time until suddenly you don't know much about the characters, but you KNOW them, and now he's got you yearning for the facts but he's only slopping you a gruel that throbs from senses to land to minutiae to fiction to history to personal terrors and human hopes and suddenly the hunt is on because everything is game. Few authors are as beholden to literature's almighty show & tell ("Good writers don't tell, they show").Few authors remain as true to what they love while at once roaming the great wilderness of our globe both in story and, surely, in life. And only le Carre has the eyebrows of a musk ox, the chizikian chin that juts him into relevance nearly as sharply as his bleeding conscience, the eyes of a reveler and the soul of a man who would risk it, all of it, to do the right thing if only he could figure out what it was. I, myself, love him as a wordfather, a man who I once dismissed for a rambling whiner but now treasure for the instructive and purely delightful polonial tale-forger that he is. I take this time, early before work, to execute the Golden Rule and review one of his in the ancient and infant hope that he'll someday review one of mine. Viceroy Alabama
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(VISITOR) AUTHOR'S NAME
Mono
MESSAGE TIMESTAMP
20 december 2014, 04:54:18
AUTHOR'S IP LOGGED
1.22.86.180
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