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A review of A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

Tense and emotional novel about fathers and sons, identity and deception.

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

A Perfect Spy I took up John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, a tome of 704 pages, because I was so stunned by an autobiographical piece by the same author in The New Yorker (Feb. 18, 2002). His father was a clever con artist over decades, and his son – and scores of other admirers – were alternately charmed and left feeling taken in and ultimately abandoned. I had given up on the spy novels several times – too densely written, too melancholy, plus I'm a bit too young to identify with Cold War dramas. This novel was said to be his most autobiographical, and I wanted to learn more.

Like The Duke of Deception, A Perfect Spy is about a con artist father with a strong sense of style, and is written from the son's point of view. Magnus Pym, the son, is attempting to tell his own son the story of his life and motivations. To do so, he finds it necessary to tell his father's life story. Magnus says "I'm free" when he learns that his father has died; in The Duke of Deception, we learn that Geoffrey Wolff says "thank God" at the same moment in his life. If you read the books in close succession, you can learn an incredible amount about fathers and sons, about the motivations and schemes of con artists, about human survival techniques and resilience.

le Carré has written a novel about the effects of a father's constant major and petty deceptions on his son. Magnus Pym's survival strategy is to become himself a master of deception, spy and even double agent and in his personal life never admitting to his true identity or revealing his true self.

As always with this author, the story is revealed in onion-like layers of both time and meaning, and the reader has to pay close attention to keep characters and timeline straight. But the effort is worth it to get to know how a spy par excellence, in this case Magnus Pym, is formed.

Magnus' father, Rick, concocts elaborate con schemes, the more complicated the better. He wins and keeps the loyalty of various lieutenants, who play vital roles as coordinators and drivers, complicit in his complex schemes. Rick's "Theory of Property: ... any money passing through Rick's hands is subject to a redefinition of the laws of property, since whatever he does with it will improve mankind, whose principal representative he is. Rick, in a word, is not a taker but a giver and those who call him otherwise lack faith." Why does Rick inspire such loyalty in his lieutenants? Is it the same reason he inspires such boundlessly disappointed love in his son?

Magnus' primary coping strategy is to become a chameleon. His wife, Mary, both understands him and doesn't: "Magnus is of course in whatever mood he needs to be in." That is, she has recognized what he has to do to keep going (though not why) and loves him both because of and despite it.

The characters, e.g. Mary, upper-class, loyal, in love with her husband, familiar with the ways of the Secret Service, and the places – diplomatic Vienna, English boarding school, Czech spy exchanges, the Greek island of Lesbos – come to life. You can feel them.

Overall it's a very sad and thoroughly believable book, perceptive and entertaining.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: A Perfect Spy

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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