John le Carré

Silverview by John le Carré review: a minor masterpiece

The final le Carré novel is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an old man looking back on his extraordinary career

Five of the best crime and thrillers of 2021

Ian Thomson
26 October 2021

John le Carré, who died last December at the age of 89, did not really exist. His name was a “cover” for a former British Intelligence officer called David Cornwell, who monitored the trap-door disappearance of agents in Cold War Germany and ran agents in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. By his own admission, le Carré took a degree of pleasure in double-dealing and duplicity if not outright dissemblance. (Reportedly he enjoyed “playing” on his first wife’s suspicion that he was homosexual.) As an MI6 operative in Bonn in the early 1960s, alarmingly, he tapped phones and effected break-ins.

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma​ - review: a Greek tragedy and a West African farmer

The prose is over-ripe at times, but no matter. West Africa, with its pantheon of animist divinities and juju lore, is unforgettably evoked, says Ian Thomson

Ian Thomson
10 January 2019

I

n his new novel Chigozie Obioma recounts the sorrows of a young Nigerian poultry farmer who returns to his native land after a period in the Mediterranean. Like all exiles, Chinoso feels that he has come home to a world that has moved on without him. Long brooding over the loss of his homeland has exaggerated its charm. Like Homer’s homesick voyager Odysseus, Chinoso longs to recount the tribulations of his life in exile, but who will believe him? Strikingly, Obioma applies the epic darkness of Greek tragedy to a modern Nigerian morality.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review: can artificial life ever be worth more than a human life?

With its hushed intensity of emotion, this fable about robot love and loneliness confirms Ishiguro as a master prose stylist, says Ian Thomson

Ian Thomson
25 February 2021

K

azuo Ishiguro came to Britain from his native Nagasaki as a child in 1960; it was not until the 1980s that he held a British passport. He remains the finest (perhaps the only) Japanese-born novelist writing in English in Britain today. In 2017 he won the Nobel prize for literature.