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I finished reading the A Perfect Spya week or so ago, and it is still occupying so much of my thought that I haven’t been able to take on anything else of substance since.

Le Carre’s repeating themes of deception and betrayal are in full play: Magnus Pym is a perfect spy because he has deceived and betrayed everyone, including himself.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Perfect Spy for me is that it is heavily autobiographical. His forlorn childhood, education, manipulative con-man father and career as a spy echo Le Carre’s own. Pym’s story, a novel within a novel, reveals a devastating familiarity with the psychology of a person seeking approval and identity, because he feels none.

Steven Poole in a Guardian review says ‘The novel’s forensic psychological account of Pym’s life represents Le Carré’s most detailed investigation into the kind of damaged and compromised person who makes, according to its brutally ironic title, the ideal espionage agent�.

I haven’t read Sisman’s biography of Le Carre, and I’m happy to leave it in the background of my reading life.

Several of the reviews I’ve read have listed the Perfect Spy as amongst Le Carre’s top novels, even perhaps his best. For instance, David Denby wrote in the New Yorker: 'By the time he wrote “A Perfect Spy,� le Carré understood that espionage is an extreme version of the human comedy, even the human tragedy. It will very likely remain his greatest book'.

It’s a complex story, brilliantly told with a strong narrative style which kept me riveted, even as it switched between the objective narrative voice of the present and the, at first confusing, voice of Pym as he writes about his life from childhood to the present, the novel within the novel.

It goes well beyond the genre of spy fiction and stands as a major work of literary fiction.

I’m going to finish by quoting Peter Straub in Book Forum: ‘As the acts of treachery done to him and committed by him mount up, Pym slides into a grim fragmentation intensified by le Carré’s giddy technique. Rotating between third- and first-person points of view, the book incorporates addresses by the narrator to himself-as-other, an imaginative leap I’ve never seen any other author dare to attempt. A Perfect Spy is my favorite of le Carré’s novels: Here, with no George Smiley to divert the underlying anguish into conventional spy-story channels, it flashes and gleams like the treasure it is�.


Reviews I found stimulating and informative:

John Banville on Le Carre
John Banville on the biography of Le Carre/David Cornwell

Frank Conroy, New York Times

David Denby in

Steven Poole in the Guardian

Peter Straub