Name: The Russia House
Rating: 4.5 (3 reviews)

John Le Carré

The Secret Pilgrim ; A Murder of Quality

The Russia House

John le Carré

It is the third uncertain summer of the perestroika. Niki Landau, philanderer and travelling representative, attends the first Moscow audio fair and is accosted by a beautiful Russian girl named Katya, who asks him to take a parcel back to England.

The parcel is addressed to the unlikely person of Barley Blair, jazz-player, drinker and derelict English publisher. It contains information held to be vital to the defence of the West.

But this surefire recipe for heroic action is no longer what it seems. Times and heroes are on the change. The Iron Curtain is rusting so fast that the battle cries of the Cold War are sounding increasingly hollow to everyone but the professionals. And Barley Blair is a man who makes his own rules of engagement. He is much married, he has children from different lives. Yet the unused love in him is still hunting for a home, and the tattered idealism for a cause. In Katya, from the first moment of their meeting, he believes he has found both. But has he? And, even if he has, is it, as Katya would say, convenient?

Contriving once again to catch history in the act, John le Carré draws us into his secret world and makes it do duty for our own. In Moscow, Leningrad and London, on an island off the coast of Maine that belongs to the CIA, and in the very heart of Barley Blair himself, le Carré spins us not only a spy story and an anti-spy story, but an allegory of individual love pitched against corporate attitudes of habitual belligerence. Thrilling, moving and often very funny. The Russia House is an irreverent and ultimately optimistic fable of our time.

The Russia House The Secret Pilgrim ; A Murder of Quality

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