Reader’s Recommendation: The Night Manager, by John le Carré

This is a very, very different book going in dry, to the point a good couple of chapters give a slice-of-life, luxury retail feeling. The transition of exotic location to character, then to the sleeping giant of The Night Manger’s plot can be abrupt, even making out the story is akin to flotsam on a river, part of the intended world of tradecraft.

The Night Manager portions you a lot of titbits of information, and gives after that initial portrait of its characters’ eccentricities a means to strip the first impression away. What is beyond the fashions and wealth, money, power or birth one buys? Then the looming monoliths of the Home Office, Civil Service and intelligence agencies in Great Britian, and the faceless organisations within the USA get faced on the ground floor, by those oddballs, mercenaries and sociopaths who all have gotten hooks in the grand international stage, with its lavish parities and barren environs for firefights.

The further it goes, the better this novel gets. There’s two separate periods where our protagonist’s persona, his life, every habit changes like a new pilot episode. You will be more engaged halfway than when starting. And those carefully placed fever dream sequences, where the narrative becomes more human, subject to pain and reconciliation and confusion really gets the reader to peddle for themselves, I was pressing ahead for a good hour unwilling to let the mystery elude me until reaching the finale.

My best friend gifted me a copy of The Night Manager for good reason, and it’s a classic spy novel in that the allure isn’t necessarily from thrills of action. It’s pulling you into the clear headed processes one requires to beat criminals, how traits and utilities cause one to be valued, but that the grains of a few days stick into us and shape our deeply held convictions, motivation, and drive for justice. Highly recommended for the crime connoisseur, a read well worth the patience to digest.