The Tailor of Panama

John Le Carre

ISBN 10: 0679458131 ISBN 13: 9780679458135

Publisher: Random House Audio, 2001

Synopsis

4 cassettes / 6 hours
Read by the Author

"Le Carre remains far in front in his field, a startlingly up-to-date storyteller who writes as well about the shadows around the power elite as anyone alive."
-Publishers Weekly

Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption.  It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal.  

Seldom has the weight of politics descended so heavily on such a tiny and unprepared nation.  And seldom has the hidden eye of the British Intelligence selected such an unlikely champion as Harry Pendel - a charmer, a dreamer, an evader, a fabulist and presiding genius to the house of Pendel & Braithwaite Co. Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of London and presently of Panama City.

Yet there is a logic to the spies' choice, for everybody who is anybody in Cental America passes through Pendel's doors.  He dresses politicos and crooks and conmen.  His fitting room hears more confidences than the priest's confessional.  And when Harry Pendel doesn't hear things as such - well, he hears them anyway, by other means.

In a thrilling, hilarious AudioBook, le Carre once again effortlessly expands the borders of the spy story to bring us a magnificent entertainment straight out of the pages of tomorrow's history.

About this title

Review

John le Carré, the greatest spy novelist of the Cold War era, continues his post-Cold War quest to define the genre he helped perfect. The classic spy novel was essentially a story of good (England, the United States) vs. evil (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union), in which good more or less prevailed. The Tailor of Panama is something else entirely: a spy novel with no spies in which the bad guys reap most of the rewards. It is also a viciously funny satire. The novel is set in Panama, where a plot is in place to make void the Panama Treaty, which would return control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians in 1999. At the center of events is Harry Pendel, the tailor of the title. Coerced into working for British Intelligence, he concocts out of whole cloth a left-wing movement with the goal of luring the American military to do the dirty work--invade Panama à la 1989 and nullify the treaty. From the characters to the setting, le Carré has succeeded in setting new parameters for an old genre.

From the Publisher

10 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Audio
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679458131
• ISBN 13: 9780679458135
• Binding: Audio Cassette