The Russia House

The Russia House is my favorite Le Carre, although I'm just getting started on his books. I enjoyed it immensely. The characters were extraordinarly well developed, even for Le Carre who is quite good at that. I enjoyed the plot, the dialouge, the characters. The idea of human love being greater than political reprecussions was a great one. Barley Blair is an imperfect publisher, a saxophonist and a drinker. He is likable and he is in love with Katya, a Russian woman. He meets her as he is drawn into Cold War espionage by chance- the world of the "grey men". I liked Ned, the human intelligence agent runner, who got along well with people but not as much with science and such. Walter, an almost girlish, strange and awkward spy was my favorite because of his fraility, his seeming too fragile for the world of espionage, and how he turned out to be right in his theories. The Russia House deals with the moral as well as the political, and deals with it very well.

This may be Le Carre's best book - and the film is definitely the best work adapted from Le Carre. The setting - the final years of the Soviet Union - is wonderfully decayed (shades of Third Man). Our hero, a saxophone-playing pseudo-leftie book trader, is a remarkably strong character (compared with him, the rest of Le Carre's leads are plodding self-doubters and handwringers). Our heroine is equally resolute. Some sharp observations on the Anglo-American relationship are also made. My favorite line from the book comes when it's decided to ask questions of the Soviet scientist. Questions, Le Carre reminds us, tell a lot more than answers.

Like most of the best-selling works that came before this one from the unchallenged master of the intelligent spy thriller John LeCarre, this is a treatise on the hidden and conflicted corners of the human heart. It is said that "The Russia House" represented a formidable new challenge for the author, so quickly and unexpectedly deprived of the forty year-old cold war he had built his career so deftly and memorably describing. Yet the author mines new tunnels of cunning, deceit, and betrayal, and at the same time weaves a quite memorable love story in the spaces squeezed between the two sides. Barley Blair, the failing boozehound scion of a collapsing British publishing house with a love for everything Russian, happens by drunken though eloquent happenstance to inspire a famous Soviet scientist into attempting to sneak his manuscript detailing the real sorry state of Russian ICBM capabilities into the hands of the West in order to foster a recognition of the folly of the arms race and to end what he calls "the great lie". The scientist attempts to contact Blair, but through a series of mishaps rivaling the deeds of the keystone cops winds up landing the manuscript in the hands of the British Secret Service. So they soon want Barley to intercede with the Russian contact point to find out who the author of the manuscript is and thus determine its authenticity. So Barley pursues the beautiful but conflicted contact, an idealistic angel of mercy who soon sparks Barley's love interest and paternal concern. The game is afoot. With his usual style, suspenseful prose, and intellectual gamesmanship, LeCarre stirs the reader's interest and dismay as we see the deadly games set into motion with deadly earnest by the Brits, the Americans, and the Russians, none of whom give a rattler's damn about Barley, the contact, or the scientist. This is a stunning, suspenseful, and somewhat rueful tale of what unfolds when we discover that there is a real possibility that the so-called Soviet ICBM threat is a sham, that the missiles cannot escape their silos, that their ability to achieve trajectory or destroy targets with any accuracy is vastly over-rated. And as one can expect from the shadowy and complex geopolitical world of espionage and power that LeCarre writes so brilliantly and unforgettably about, there are no simple answers or easy foregone conclusions. This is a wonderful read and a marvelous book, and has the ring of more real-life veracity and worldly wisdom than one can easily find on the non-fiction side of the bookstore aisle. Enjoy!

John Le Carre has the gift of storytelling. To me, he is the best espionage writer alive today. Most of the espionage writers put all the emphasis on the events whereas the main theme of Le Carre's books has always been characters. Le Carre does not write breakneck thrillers. He writes characters, lively and human. And that's why when you read a Le Carre book, a year down the road, you can't recall the story but you can easily recall the characters of the story. He is the creator of many memorable characters and Barley Blair is one of them.Barley is not a hero, not even a patriot. He is a careless publisher, a jazz player and a chess fan. He is not a spy. He is pushed into the espionage game because of his drunken exchange of thoughts with a Russian scientist, another of Le Carre's memorable characters. Barley has reluctantly agreed to play the part of a courier and agent-runner by British spymasters and on his arrival in Moscow, he falls in love with a girl, who very much like Barley himself, is pushed into the spy game.Barley soon reaches a point where he has to decide whom to betray. The girl he loves or his country. To me, that is the climax of the novel, the classical dilemma.And dilemma it is. Here is Barley Blair, the main character, forming one part of the triangle, who is not a spy, doesn't even want to be one. The second part of triangle is Goethe, the Russian scientist, who wants to tell something to the world but not through the spies. And the third part is Katya, loved by both Goethe and Barley, who doesn't even know what is she doing and where does she fit in the whole scheme of things. And in the background are the spymasters of UK and USA who think they have all the strings in their hands but have totally ignored the fact that human nature is an essential part of all the espionage equations.You've got to read the novel to know the whole thing. And if you are into serious fiction, you must read "The Russia House".

`Spying is waiting'. So believable. Unlike the breakneck speed of events of popular espionage fiction, John Le Carre takes us into the REAL world of spying where you do your bit and wait for the reactions. Things don't happen at the speed at which we wish them to. His characters don't speak from high moral grounds, so typical to Tom Clancy's characters. Nor they are reluctant heroes of Robert Ludlum. They are real people, afraid, greedy, selfish, people who you can relate with, people who don't have the power to eliminate the evils of the world single-handedly. These are the people who know that the evils are here to stay, and in some sense they are also part of it. Elimination of evil will mean self-destruction. They just play the part in the manner they are told to and wait to get out of the evil-machine of espionage. `Spying IS waiting'