Buy this book on-line Le CARRE**, JOHN: : THE SECRET PILGRIM. **LONDON.HODDER &STOUGHTON,1991. ISBN 0340543817.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.FINE/FINE.Neat,blue inked familial,gift presentation inscrptn to front blank but no price-clip to dw/dj.Bright, crisp,clean,glossy laminated,3 colour (dark blue,yellow and red) oblique angled bands to front panel of dw/dj with b/w lettering,rear panel with author's contemporary b/w portrait photograph; with negligible shelf-wear or creasing to edges and corners - no nicks or tears present.Top edges very faintly toned with barely perceptible dust-soiling and a faint finger smudge towards headband area,fore-edges brighter and cleaner without any marks; contents bright,tight,clean,solid and sound - virtually pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corners,appears unread - apart from my own collation.Bright,crisp,clean,sharp-cornered, publisher's original plain black cloth boards with bright,crisp,blocked gilt letters to spine/ backstrip,a b/w striped headband and immaculate plain navy blue endpapers.UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn,5-335pp [paginated] includes 13 chapters; plus [unpaginated] gift inscrptned blank,half-title+title pages,a dedication and to the rear a note on the type (Janson) used and 6pp blanks.
For the past thirty years John le Carre has delighted his readership with a comedie humaine of the secret world,which always reflected the contemporary scene, and sometimes eerily predicted it.Thus,before the Cold War had officially ended,he was giving us 'The Russia House',which not only foresaw the total demise of the Iron Curtain but triumphantly heralded the era of glasnost.
In 'The Secret Pilgrim',le Carre nimbly contrives to look both forward and backward at the same time.Who were we in those Cold War years? he asks - and what will we become now that the conventional cliches of hostility have been swept away?
He gives us a past defined by Before the Fall and After the Fall,and the Fall was the unmasking of the traitor Bill Haydon.
He gives us a future perhaps equally dangerous, waiting to be written.
The questions are posed,in part,by Ned - surname unknown - whose final task in the evening of his long intelligence career is to train the new generation of men and women who will take their places as tomorrow's spies.At the passing-out dinner at the close of their training course,Ned is spurred into a sentimental journey through his own life,from recruitment to imminent retirement.The result, for the reader,is a dazzling array of recollections,part comic,part tragic,part futile - each one of them a milestone along the secret pilgrim's journey.
The questions are answered - glancingly, elusively,sometimes with a delphic ambiguity - by George Smiley,whom Ned has invited as his guest of honour for the occasion - George,the oldest and canniest Cold Warrior of them all who,having presided over Ned's career,now presides over this fabled feast of memories and glittering,if deluded,future hopes.
In this book lies real magic.Subliminal magic.Magic of the moment.The magic of an awkward world haltingly accepting its singleness,and looking back on its divisions.The magic of an uncharted future beckoning to an overburdened past.To mix his magic,le Carre sprinkles a host of splendid new characters among the old knights of his own writing past: George Smiley,Toby Esterhase,Bill Haydon and Ned of the Russia House among many others - each has his hour and takes his final bow in this pageant of the ever-changing,never-ending secret world,which in le Carre's hands is merely the inmost room of our overt lives.
'The Secret Pilgrim' holds us entranced by its story-telling genius.It is John le Carre's most magnificent novel.
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