3.5
A Delicate Truth
ByPublisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies.
"A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.
Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be—or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?
"A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.
Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be—or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesA Delicate Truth Reviews
3.5
“Another solid outing for John le Carré. He never tells you the ending because you know the ending and you know it is not happy. But it’s real. And it’s truthful. It is the way of the actual world.”
“A solid modern Le Carre story, though by no means his best. I felt the characters mainly lacked the depth he usually provides in his novels, though we're still interesting. The story revolves around a cover-up of a failed operation, and is a much more explicit and politically driven story than most of his other books. It started slow, though by the end was impossible to pit down. I understand some people's confusion with the jumpy timeliness, though it's worth sticking with.
I've also seen a lot of mixed reviews around the ending, but I personally enjoyed the abruptness and uncertainty. In a way, it sort of made the story even stronger. Each to their own though.”
“I had owned this book for about a decade but not had a time to pick it up. It was a pleasurable read. On its most basic level, it deals with the consequences of a secret British operation to kidnap a terrorist showing up for an arms deal at a dinner in Gibraltar. Le Carre describes the operation early in the book, though he leaves out some of the details, which means that the reader is piecing together what happens as are other characters who were involved in the operation (or connected to it) in varying degrees. The two central characters we meet are Toby Bell and Kit Probyn, who in some ways resemble other characters from Le Carre’s fiction, but are notable for the ways that they are struggling with the new environment of the war on terror in which mercenaries, security firms, and right-wing Christian politics from the US have become entangled with the British Foreign Office.
I am a big fan of Le Carre in general, and this was no exception. I really love his use of deliberate holes in the plot (something that reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s fiction), but I also appreciate the way he works together a series of suspenseful episodes, such that I couldn’t put this book down in the later chapters.
If you’re a fan of thrillers or spy novels, I definitely recommend this!”
About John le Carré
John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a con man, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on December 12, 2020.
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