The Tailor of Panama - Hardcover

Le Carre, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679454462 ISBN 13: 9780679454465

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed, best-selling author of Our Game and The Night Manager comes an action-packed new thriller, set in Panama, that come straight from the pages of today's current news media. 300,000 first printing. Major ad/promo. BOMC & QPB Main.

About this title

About the Author

John le Carré was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He divides his time between England and the Continent.

Reviews

The fate of nations hinges on an inoffensive bespoke tailor in this archly ironic parable out of Graham Greene. Except for being hopelessly in debt over a rice farm he's unwisely purchased, there's nothing untoward about Harry Pendel, the sole survivor of Pendel & Braithwaite, late of Saville Row. Nothing, that is, except that every detail of Harry's history has been fabricated as lovingly as one of his alpaca suits. Harry's checkered past--a secret even from his proper wife Louisa, daughter of an esteemed American engineer and personal assistant to incorruptible Canal planning advisor Ernesto Delgado--makes him the natural prey of Andrew Osnard, the new man at the British Embassy. Osnard's brief from conspiracy-maven Scottie Luxmore, who's convinced that the American giveaway of the Canal in 1999 will bring world shipping to its knees, is to conscript as intelligence sources on the coming power vacuum some savvy banker, tycoon, or journalist, but he settles for Harry instead. Whatever might have made this seem like a reasonable choice- -Louisa's connections, Harry's ear to the floor of the Presidential fitting room--evaporate in a roar of corrosive laughter (not Osnard's or Harry's), as Harry, eager to please and to earn his way out of debt, begins to tailor his intelligence to order. Does Whitehall fear a Japanese plot to cut a rival canal? Harry's only too happy to provide confirmatory rumors. Do Osnard's masters require evidence from other agents? Under appropriate code names, Harry will enlist Louisa, his shop assistant Marta, and a growing army of nonexistent informants. Naturally, this house of cards can't stay aloft forever--even Luxmore realizes that Osnard's dispatches are tosh--but it's a mordant pleasure to watch the structure collapse, along with the fate of nations, in exquisitely choreographed slow motion. Le Carr‚ goes back to the spy story's roots--Our Man in Havana, with a touch of Conrad's Secret Agent--to amuse frazzled millennialists with the refreshing news that we've all been here many times before. (First printing of 300,000; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Harry Pendel is the "Tailor of Panama," a haberdasher whose clients include the Panamanian president, the commanding American general, and most of the country's powerful and influential men. Harry is happily married to Louisa, daughter of an American engineer and devoted staff member to a liberal Panamanian politician. But Harry's life is a lie; he has invented the person whose life he lives. He is also badly in debt, the result of having been double-crossed by his own bank. That debt, and knowledge of the jailbird he once was, are what make Harry prey to a smarmy British agent who believes Harry knows or can learn the deepest secrets of Panama. Harry doesn't, but he's adept at making up what people want to hear, even if it is a geopolitical conspiracy on a grand scale. By turns comic and tragic, this is the kind of reading experience we have come to expect from le Carre (The Night Manager, LJ 7/93). Surely nobody writes this kind of novel better than le Carre, not even the late Graham Greene, whose Our Man in Havana (1958) was the inspiration for this novel. For all collections.?Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The idea of the invented self has been lurking in John le Carre's work for decades, surfacing predominantly in A Perfect Spy (1986) and now in this brilliantly multilayered account of a British tailor in Panama whose manufactured universe collides tragically with reality. Like Wormwold in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, Harry Pendel is pressured into becoming a spy by an amoral British agent. Desperate to avoid exposure as an ex-con, Harry fabricates a network of sources and plies the giddy Brits with tales of a coming Panamanian revolution. Harry's dreams of protecting his image as an upper-crust tailor seem on the verge of coming true, but the more energy he invests in propping up his Potemkin's village of spies and revolutionaries, the more real it becomes and the more tenuous his hold on the plot of his own fiction. The tragedy is inevitable, of course, and the very loved ones whom Harry invented himself as a gentleman to please--and then as a spy to protect--are the ones who rebel against their roles in his internal universe, thus bringing it down. "Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it's for," Harry insists, missing the point but winning our hearts. Invented selves, le Carrereminds us again and again, are born to protect us from our demons but eventually become them. Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679454462
• ISBN 13: 9780679454465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 331