Has anyone read 'Our Kind of Traitor.?'

I have just completed reading the Public Library's copy of "Our Kind of Traitor," John le Carre's most recent novel. Has anybody else read it, or listened to the abridged CD version read by the Author? If so, I would be interested to hear your opinions of it.

As nearly a week has gone by without a comment, my curiosity overcame me and I took a look at the reviews of the novel on Amazon UK. I started with the 3 Stars out of 5 and worked down. Here is a selection. In my view, the author has lost his touch more especially when compared with the old days. How disappointing.


3 Star Review
Being a grand old man of the paperback, it seems JLC was too hot a property for his publishers to employ an good editor to take a kindly interest in this novel.

It has flashes of his old wonderfulness but mostly it's a bit of a trudge.

Maybe the world has moved on, or maybe I've got used to something more succinct.
But I've currently given up around a third way through the novel, sighing something about 'the good old days when JLC was a literate writer of the page-turner thriller'.

Sigh.


2 Star Review
Difficult to imagine that this was written by the author of Smiley's People et al. The plot is implausible, the main villain barely believable and the ending a total cop out.


1 Star Review
First off, let me say that I was always a huge Le Carre fan, especially of classics such as "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and the Smiley series, "The Russia House" etc. I thought he was brilliant at capturing various Soviet or espionage-profession personalities, and crafting really believable and large-as-life characters from them.

This book, however, is a sad departure from that previous work. From the start it is told in a lame, extremely annoying flashback style. This is exacerbated by the most comical, stereotypical Russian characters you can imagine. We are told they are educated, yet not one of them can speak anything other than pidgin-English of the worst kind! How is this usual Le Carre fare?? Why has he suddenly started portraying Russians in this obvious and pathetic way, compared to his previous books?

The Russian dialogue honestly almost had me giving up by page 40 or so, coupled with the complete fakeness of the two Brits, especially Gail - the exasperating and ridiculously emotional memories that plague her are really hard to stomach, but at least you get the sense that there must be some grand explanation for it all, somewhere down the line. Alas no, there isn't, except for a terrible effort to make her seem 'cool' or 'contemporary' that again had me shutting the book. Another example of the "laughability" of this book is the internet chat room dialogue. Its a perfect example of how someone who clearly knows nothing of the 'interweb', imagines conversations taking place there. You will laugh out loud, guaranteed - the problem of course is that this prose is not comic in intent.

I won't go any further into the 'plot', but suffice it to say the whole thing is third-rate, and is in the starkest of contrast with his earlier brilliant work. He has definitely lost the plot, excuse the pun - but that sort of terrible pun is actually better than most of the content of this book!

Only an author with Le Carre's reputation and pedigree could have gotten this book published - that's a fact. To read this book is a painful experience - so bad in fact, that I was seriously tempted to ask for my money back.