Candi's Reviews > The Night Manager

Not a spoiler but a warning: overly enthusiastic, slightly tacky review ahead.

“Yes, I am adept. I spy. I betray. I love when it is too late.”

I’d say better late than never, Jonathan Pine. You’ve now joined the ranks of my imaginary fictional lovers (several of whom are le Carré creations. Hello Jerry Westerby and Justin Quayle. Shout out to Charlie Ross and her handler, Joseph!) But I’m already digressing: John le Carré writes espionage not romance novels, for god’s sake. Still, he knows how to insert just the right amount of passionate intrigue in his books. Really though, he does construct such wonderfully nuanced characters – particularly his main ones. Jonathan Pine is living a self-imposed life of isolation as the night manager of a Swiss hotel. His troubled past and the ghost of a woman he felt he has betrayed haunt him. It leads to a lot of self-recrimination and self-examination.

“Look at himself how he might, he saw nothing but half-measures, failures and undignified withdrawals… In childhood he had struggled night and day to be an inadequate adult. As a special serviceman he had cloaked himself in blind obedience and, with occasional lapses, endured. As a lover, husband and adulterer, his record was quite as thin: a burst or two of wary pleasure, followed by years of abuse and craven apology.”

All of the above lends well to the fact that Jonathan makes an excellent candidate for the British intelligence agency to recruit as an undercover agent in the illegal arms and drugs trade. The settings are magnificent, sending one across the globe from places like Switzerland, Cornwall, Quebec, The Bahamas and Panama. There’s a bit of glamour to this particular piece, with the billionaire Dicky Roper, “the worst man in the world”, taking the lead as the baddie. Still, it’s leagues above your run-of-the-mill spy story. In fact, no one but an insider could know the ins and outs of the intelligence world. The first time I read le Carré, I admit to nearly giving up because I couldn’t easily grasp all the spy jargon, the various agencies (like the arms of an octopus, as one character aptly describes it). What I’ve learned after several books now, however, is that I won’t necessarily get it all immediately, and that’s okay. The further along I read, the more comfortable I become with the various characters and their relationships to one another and their respective agencies. It all (or nearly all!) becomes clear by the end.

Oh, and remember how I carried on about my love affair with Jonathan? My role is all in my head. The actual titles of lover go to Sophie and later Jed. I always have fun with these, even if those love interests are a bit sexist. I still came out at the end as a bit of a drooling fool, feeling a bit emptier between the ears than normal… Poor Jed. She’s a bit misunderstood, perhaps.

“I haven’t heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge. Yet every time I think of something funny, I need you to laugh at it, and when I’m low, it’s you I need to cheer me up. I don’t know who you are, if you’re anyone at all… I think you’re a total mess. But that doesn’t put me off. Not at all. It makes me indignant, it makes me a fool, it makes me want to wring your neck. But that’s just part of the package.”

Brilliant writing, nicely paced plot, plenty of “gray” characters, and loads of tension made for another hugely satisfying reading adventure. If I were a nail biter, I’d have had them down to the quick by that ending. Instead, I queued up the trailer for the miniseries and watched it whenever I felt on edge (or needed my daily Tom Hiddleston fix).

“… what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.”