Helpful Score: 1
I hate shopping for clothes. Its the trying on that I really loath: measuring, alterations, and all that. Thus, the first fifty pages were sheer agony. Le Carré gives us all the goring details of the tailor in his natural habitat. I know all of the measurements necessary for a tailor-made suit. Now I have to buy a sewing machine. But finally we get a peek at the spy within, and, shades of Graham Greene, isnt this a simulacrum of Our Man in Havana. Conflict created by fabricated intelligence. (The author acknowledges this at the very end of the book.) Tedious at points: too much barely intelligible spy-speak compared to his other novels.
