Kakutani did her usual hatchett job on a book she disagrees with. Also, it is interesting that they published the review a week before publication. Usually they only do this when they are praising a book. Lastly, Janet Maslin has been their usual reveiwer for crime/espionage/suspense novels. Seems odd to assign it to Kakutani.
There are several reviews at this site:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/absolute_friends/
Reviews show he calls America a "hyperpower" and recommends reading Chomsky. The book is 50% off at amazon.co.uk.
Below is the review from The Independent:
Absolute Friends by John le Carré
From the circus to the reptile fund By Roy Hattersley 04 January 2004
Ever since the spy came in from the cold, John le Carré's novels have carried a highly moral, but properly subtle, message. The grand climax of Absolute Friends - "the siege of Heidelberg as it immediately became known to the world's media" - is more directly censorious than we would expect from so sophisticated an author. The "shoot-out" is engineered by the CIA and its disreputable associates to demonstrate that the urban terrorists, who are all around us, can only be prevented from destroying western society by the unrestrained power of the United States. Who could but disapprove?
Because the final chapters are (at least by implication) profoundly censorious, some critics have argued that Absolute Friends is flawed. The account of the anti-hero "clinging to the window sill with both bloody hands" until he is shot "with studied deliberation - through the centre of his brow" is certainly as polemical as it is graphic. And its author asked for trouble by acknowledging his debt to John Pilger - often right but invariably intolerable. But he does not deserve it. Absolute Friends is mostly classic le Carré and that means fiction of a very high order.
As always, every character is morally ambivalent - which is why it is probably wrong to describe Ted Mundy as an anti-hero. Mundy is, like so many of le Carré's creations, seedily pathetic - a failure by the standards of the world around him who ekes out a living as a bilingual tour guide to Bavarian castles. A public-school cricketer who "dropped out" from Oxford, he enjoyed a brief spell of respectability as a minor British Council official before he set up home with a Turkish prostitute and, more significantly, renewed his friendship with Sasha, an East German refugee.
Mundy was one of "midnight's children" - born just as continental India gained its independence - and we are properly left to guess how much his character and his conduct has been determined by the faded jingoism of his father. Like so many of le Carré's agents, he seems to have drifted into the world of spies and counter-spies not because of patriotism, political conviction or greed, but simply because it provides some sort of distraction from the dreary disappointments of everyday life. Absolute Friends is a grown-up novel in which the characters are more complicated than the plot.
Their fascination is their moral ambivalence. Mundy's last (and fatal) excursion originates in his hopes of raising enough capital from a bogus peace organisation to fund his own language school. But if he had really been in the "circus" for what he could get out of it, he would have quit his last rendezvous before the shooting started instead of hanging about in the hope of saving his friend. He lives according to a code - unconventional but a code nevertheless. So do the men who give him orders and on whom his life depends.
Amory, his immediate superior in the service, lives what he clearly believes to be a life of studied propriety. When he offers Mundy escape money, which is never used, he tells his agent that he has stolen it from "the reptile's fund", cash to be used for bribery and other disreputable purposes. Mundy is not fooled for a second. Honour requires the reptile fund to be spent on reptiles. The escape money has come out of Amory's own pocket.
Le Carré has always been an expert on ethical ambiguity. In Absolute Friends he delicately illustrates the double standards of our political times with a wonderfully constructed conversation between Mundy and his estranged wife about the upbringing of their son. A new Labour parliamentary candidate for a northern constituency, she is in complete command. He is heroically or pathetically - but in either case, absolutely - prepared to accept whatever she suggests. "In Jake's case only Kate is half decided to waive her objection to private schools. Jake's turbulent nature cries out for individual attention - and there's no obvious local alternative."
Perhaps it was inevitable that some reviewers would resent that sort of social commentary appearing in what they thought was a Boy's Own Paper spy yarn. But although le Carré has always written about espionage and counter- espionage, those stimulating topics have always been the vehicle for his commentary on a more exciting subject - human nature. By the end of Absolute Friends, I felt affection and admiration for the seedy little agent whose squalid end was a parable of the United States' ruthless pursuit of worldwide hegemony. Even if its message were not true and important, Absolute Friends would be a fine novel.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister