German Ghosts (Absolute Friends - John Le Carre)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Absolute Friends - John Le Carre
Date:	28/09/07 (217 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good story, well researched, atmospheric

Disadvantages: present tense, strange ending

I’ve known the famous author of spy-thrillers John le Carré (né David John Moore) for many years, in the 1960s I saw the film The Spy Who Came in From the Cold made after the book with the same title, I read A Small Town in Germany in the 1970s and Russia House in the early 1990s; I found the film and the books thrilling, why didn‘t I read more of his 24 books? I‘ve realised that I‘m too simple-minded for the genre, I often have to read an ending more than once until I get the pivotal twist and that can be frustrating.

When I read a review about Absolute Friends (2003), I thought I could give it a go, what intrigued me was that the story is set in Germany, for me it’s an extra pleasure to find out how an author describes a country I know well, what they find worth mentioning, if they’ve done their homework and have got everything right. Le Carré used to live and work in Germany for many years, first as a civil servant, later as a member of the Secret Service, so I didn’t really expect him to make mistakes, but there‘s always hope. :-)

The Brit Ted Mundy is a tour guide for the ‘English-Spoken cattle’ in one of Mad King Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria, the beginning of the first sentence, “On the day his destiny returned to claim him . . . “ is superb, I want to go on reading. Mundy is on the run from the debts that accumulated in the language school he had in Heidelberg together with a partner who ‘fled with the last of his assets’. He lives together with a Turkish woman and her son in Munich and seems to be settling down of sorts. On the day in question his old friend Sasha visits him in the castle and tells him to meet him at a clandestine place outside.

The second chapter shows that this isn’t the beginning of the story proper but only a frame, we’re taken to the Hindu Kush and learn about Mundy’s childhood in Pakistan where he grew up as the son of a British colonial officer. I was a bit puzzled by le Carré’s decision to use a frame story whose nature is to be taken up again in the end, so whatever is going to happen to Mundy in his life will end well, or at least not in a catastrophe, and finally lead him to Munich, Germany, where’s the thrill then?

Mundy and his father move to England, “a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb”. At boarding school he learns German, during his language studies at Oxford he gets into contact with radical students and when he can go to Berlin for an academic year, a friend sends him to a certain Sasha. He’s a refugee from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and the charismatic leader of an anarchist students’ squatter commune. The two hit it off at once, Ted moves in with Sasha and they become friends, they’re separated, though, when Ted is beaten up by the police and sent back to England.

The year is 1969, the students’ unrest is boiling, hardly anyone does any academic work any more, it’s the time of blockades, sit-ins, manifestations (“Stop the War in Vietnam!”). Le Carré excels in this part of the novel, he definitely knows what he’s writing about, he knows the names and the importance of the most influential leaders of the students’ movement, the SDS (Socialist German Students’ Union), the APO (Extra Parliamentary Opposition), describes the rage Sasha and his friends feel against the establishment and their hope to overthrow it and to introduce a socialist society.

This part of the story moves me not only because it’s about an important period in the history of my home country but also because Ted and Sasha are only a bit younger than I am and what is described here is also part of my life. I didn’t belong to any radical movement, but it wasn’t possible not to be touched by what was going on. One can say that the Federal Republic of Germany wouldn’t be what it is today without this period and the ghosts of that time still haunt the country. It’s difficult for me to imagine that the vast majority of the readers will see all this only as background information (after all a novel must be set somewhere) - proof that the post-modernist insight that each reader reads their own book is correct.

Sasha’s dreams don’t become true, though, the proletariat doesn’t join the students, overthrow the establishment and create a socialist state which frustrates him so much that he moves back to where he escaped from, he gets over the wall from West to East. He learns very soon that socialism in theory is quite a different thing from the real-life socialism in the GDR, in the end he becomes a double agent and having found Ted Mundy again draws him in as well. They both spy for the East and hand over their knowledge to the West. I can’t spoil the plot for you if you haven’t been hibernating during the last decades, it’s clear that Perestroika and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain make the two spies redundant.

The frame story from the beginning is taken up again, we’ve got a well-constructed novel of 244 pages, strangely, it doesn’t end here but goes on for another 140 pages! What follows? Sasha, the dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary, has found a new enemy and - as before - draws Ted in to fight him. This time it’s American neo-imperialism but we don’t get a second round, a re-warmed version of the East-West spy-story, the remaining text is more a pamphlet, le Carré uses his characters to preach us his view of the world, listen to this, “It was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-Nine Eleven psychopathy.” Strong stuff, eh? Doesn’t do the novel good from a literary point of view. And then the finale of apocalyptic dimensions! I had to read it three times until I finally got it.

Of course, I can‘t hold my simple-mindedness against the author. What I do hold against him, however, is his use of the present tense. I dislike it with all my heart, I tolerate it only in chick lit where the period of time which is described is short and the breathlessness created by the use of the present tense is adequate. But Absolute Friends follows the lives of two men over three decades! I can’t imagine what made the author write the book in this silly way, it really gets on my nerves.

Any more niggles? Oh yes, indeed, the façade of the Hotel Ritter in Heidelberg is not Baroque but Renaissance! :-)


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Coronet Books
383 pages
first published in 2003
RRP 6.99 GBP

Summary: the life story of two double agents