Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 1999, 345 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2000, 385 pages
Masterful and prescient, Le Carré is writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single
& Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was
in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to
explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young
daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast
guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single
disappears into thin air.
In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel
of espionage opens with a haunting set piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose
connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. This is a story of corrupt liaisons
between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in
the West. Le Carré's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate portrait of two
families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering
the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed, and redeemed, by a son.
This is territory le Carré knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is
writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist,
is one of his most fascinating characters.
Excerpt
Single & Single
This gun is not a gun.
Or such was Mr. Winser's determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European
managing director and chief executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, St. Petersburg and Istanbul,
introduced a pallid hand into the breast of his Italian blazer and extracted neither a
platinum cigarette case nor an engraved business card, but a slim blue-black automatic
pistol in mint condition, and pointed it from a distance of six inches at the bridge of
Mr. Winser's beakish but strictly non-violent nose. This gun does not exist. It is
inadmissible evidence. It is no evidence at all. It is a nongun.
Mr. Alfred Winser was a lawyer, and to a lawyer facts were there to be
challenged. All facts. The more self-evident a fact might appear to the layman, the more
vigorously must the conscientious lawyer contest it. And Winser at that moment was as
conscientious as the best of them. Nevertheless, he dropped ...
Tom Wolfe
[M]ore than just a great
storyteller. In Single & Single, he captures the Zeitgeist itself.
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