Another not very good late John le Carre. This is what I imagined his books would be like when I chose not to read them, before I found out that some of them were in fact very good. A clapped out ageing spy in the final stages of his not very illustrious career, put in charge of a London based department where the not very good spies are left to fester, stumbles into something that might be a bit bigger than him. It feels dated, because I associate the world from which the clapped out spy comes with the past - men wearing blazers and grey flannel trousers, posh clubs and schools - but really all that is still here, it's just not part of my world at all.
Part of the tension in the book comes from the fact that even for people in that separate world, there are points of overlap with the world that I know - wives who work as human rights lawyers, kids who go off to work on eco projects rather than into the city or the law.
For a while the pace of the plot and the series of unexpected twists got me more involved, but by the implausible and not very interesting denouement I was waiting for it to be over.
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