'Our Kind of Traitor' by John le Carre - Book Review

Post-cold war le Carre novels could be called cerebral. Others might say they’re just plain slow. I appreciated The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man. They weren’t classic works, but despite their dismal outlooks and dreary endings, they stuck with me. Don’t expect much change tonally with Our Kind of Traitor. This isn’t a cheery read to be enjoyed with a cup of tea. But at least Dima, the Russian money-launderer wishing to defect, sticks with you like gum on a steel-toed boot in Siberia.

There’s not much romance left in spying. This has been le Carre’s theme since he began writing cold war thrillers decades ago. Now he’s a seasoned author and the cold war is gone. Any hints of romance are gone, too. Espionage is which country can gain the most monetarily from leaked information and how civilians can become pawns in moving the money (or keeping it put).

This go around from le Carre involves some British yuppies -- former Oxford tutor, Perry Makepiece, and his gorgeous lawyer girlfriend, Gail Perkins -- meeting a Russian family while they are all on vacation. The patriarch, Dima, is one of the world’s biggest money launderers and wants Perry to connect him with MI6 so he can escape the Russian mafia and be safely transported to England with his family under witness protection. But whose money is he really laundering? And who is really running MI6?

Despite their flaws and annoying attributes, I ended up rooting for the characters in Our Kind of Traitor even though I should know better. This is le Carre after all. God forbid the story should turn out well for anyone. To his credit, le Carre’s prose is so sharp and beautiful, he holds interest until the bitter end. And this one is exceptionally bitter, making Our Kind of Traitor seem like just a nihilistic wake up call for readers who still think everyone in the world isn’t hopelessly lost in a death cog of corruption and greed.