"A terrible novel" -- it says so right on the cover.
Apparently the "revolutionary portrayal" of "amoral Western agents and the moral equivalence of the East and the West" [Wikipedia] was evident in his first spy novel.
Did the later ones add anything -- or were they just reworkings of the same material?
And what did LeCarré have left to write about when the Cold War ended?
Apparently the “revolutionary portrayal” of “amoral Western agents and the moral equivalence of the East and the West” [Wikipedia] was evident in his first spy novel.
The key word is “amoral” as opposed to “immoral.”
Did the later ones add anything — or were they just reworkings of the same material?
Many of the novels re-work the same theme: a couple in love crushed by larger forces. The good guys win, but they are not “happy endings.”
And what did LeCarré have left to write about when the Cold War ended?
Transnactional criminals (The Night Manager) and corporate misdeeds (The Constant Gardener).
“And what did LeCarré have left to write about when the Cold War ended?”
In Place of Nations
by John le Carre
The Nation magazine, April 9, 2001
“...But the multinational pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat and wouldn’t let me go. Big Pharma, as it is known, offered everything: the hopes and dreams we have of it; its vast, partly realized potential for good; and its pitch-dark underside, sustained by huge wealth, pathological secrecy, corruption and greed.
I learned, for instance, of how Big Pharma in the United States had persuaded the State Department to threaten poor countries’ governments with trade sanctions in order to prevent them from making their own cheap forms of the patented lifesaving drugs that could ease the agony of 35 million men, women and children in the Third World who are HIV-positive, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In pharma jargon, these patent-free copycat drugs are called generic. Big Pharma likes to trash them, insisting they are unsafe and carelessly administered. Practice shows that they are neither. They simply save the same lives that Big Pharma could save, but at a fraction of the cost........”
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/InPlace_Nations.html