A Most Wanted Man

By: John le Carré

Narrated by: Roger Rees

Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.

Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client's survival becomes more important to her than her own career -- or safety. In pursuit of Issa's mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg.

Annabel, Issa and Brue form an unlikely alliance -- and a triangle of impossible loves is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the "War on Terror," the rival spies of Germany, England and America converge upon the innocents.

Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times.

©2008 John le Carre (P)2008 Simon & Schuster

Bad accents

This isn’t one of le Carré’s best, but if you’re a true fan, it’s still worth your time. The problem with this recording is Roger Rees’s attempts at foreign accents: the Germans, the Turks, the Russians all sound like gangsters of some vaguely Eastern European origin. This becomes unbearable when a character like Bachmann delivers a long monologue. The Scottish brogue he puts on for Brue is better (at least it’s recognizably Scottish) but still sounds a little overdone and off, even to my non-Scottish ear. When speaking normally, Rees has a pleasant enough voice and fine Received Pronunciation, but it’s not enough to save the performance. Anybody who reads a le Carré novel, which inevitably has an international cast of characters, needs proper accent training!

A most unsatisfactory ending

I have grown used to ambiguous and far-from happy endings from le Carre, but this takes the cake.

The entire story was enjoyable with subtle, building tension to ...

Ends well

Would you listen to A Most Wanted Man again? Why?

I would listen to the final 20 minutes again, because the long-awaited climax of the book is fulfilling, and the denouementis even better.

What other book might you compare A Most Wanted Man to and why?

Most of Le Carre's books share elements that are found in this one. Le Carre's gift is to create the unexpectedly complicated inner world of the spy. He has the gift of placing the spy and the people he damages into worlds in which they make meaningful connections with others, while they are deceived by each other, and ultimately betrayed by what they believe in.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

The narration was especially good when the focus of the story was on Tommy Brue—his hearty conviviality came through well.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No

Any additional comments?

It doesn't match Le Carre's best stories, but it is a satisfactory one to listen too. Sags a bit in the middle.

failure to launch

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I kept on listening waiting for it to get to the exiting part, just not in Le carre's style.
The end reminds me of the spy that came in from the cold. You don't know what happens to one of the main characters.

Would you recommend A Most Wanted Man to your friends? Why or why not?

It's not a bad book. Pick it up if it's on sale, probably not LeCarre's best

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

Didn't like the female impersonations

le Carre/Rees a Winning Pair

I expected the excellence of prose that always comes with le Carre, but was delighted (tho not surprised) at the high degree of drama and humor and tragedy delivered by Roger Rees as narrator. Highly, highly recommended!

Fascinating, angry and worldly-wise spy fiction

A post-9/11 Hamburg spy novel filled with all the key post-9/11 le Carré signposts: bureaucratic turf wars, moral ambiguities, innocents caught in the web of a 'war on terror', reckless acts, money, and a general loss of innocence. le Carré, with this novel, is really starting to not pull his punches with the West.

There are two broad phases of le Carré's spy novels. There are his early, cold war spy novels and his later, post-cold war spy novels. 'A Most Wanted Man' is obviously part of the later cycle, but within that cycle you've got several ('Absolute Friends', 'A Most Wanted Man', 'Our Kind of Traitor', 'A Delicate Truth') that deal specifically with the post 9/11 world of extraordinary rendition, torture, detention, etc.

It isn't a perfect novel, and unfortunately, the War on Terror made this novel fairly predictable. It isn't top shelf le Carré, but it is still fascinating, angry and worldly-wise in its ability to portray the cost and the complexities of the global War on Terror. le Carré is a master at exposing the cost to individuals, organizations, and countries of extracting the 5% bad from the 95% good. If you imperiously kill the patient just to remove the cancer, who benefits? The woman selling you the scalpel and the man digging plots.

Le Carre's Back!

While I don't think John le Carre will ever regain the level of the George Smiley books -- that Cold War is over, and his generation is gone -- he does seem to have finally found his metier again with this book, after floundering around for some years with very inferior books like "A Constant Gardener".

The fact is that there IS another major threat to the West, and if it's not exactly a "cold" war, it's not a "hot" one either, and it is just as ideologically driven as the Communist threat was. Le Carre not only makes his Moslem protagonists seem sympathetic, he shows just how the various intelligence services are also driven by ideology: the supremacy of human intelligence vs. technological innovation, the patient researcher vs the "cowboy", the runner of agents who want to turn potential sources to his benefit against those who want to simply quarantine and neutralize the "enemy".

The narration is excellent. Very highly recommended.

No oomph

I remember John Le Carre's books not only were historically fascinating and accurate but had some oomph that kept you compelled to keep reading -- no matter what the tale. This story dragged on and on and the ending was so flimsy - as one writer said, it left things undone. The narrator is great, the story thin and ends with a whimper.

Outstanding on so many levels

This is, in its way, a spy story. But it's a lot more than that. It is a timely investigation into the mentalities around the 'terror terror' and the shift from cold war to the war against terror. LeCarre involves you with his characters while still withholding trust. They are people you'll care about so much you (or at least I) forget that something has to happen, that it can't be easily resolved.

Every once in a while the narrator mixes his accents and a German becomes a Brit,e.g., but it's generally an excellent excellent read, excellently read.

Another Excellent Le Carre'

Hope he lives forever. This is the first one I listened to instead of reading and was not sure I would catch the nuances, but enjoyed as much as tho I read it. Very good narrator, too.