Our Kind of Traitor

John Le Carre

The conclusion of The Constant Gardener, for example, proposes that the protagonist’s life and ideals were so betrayed that life itself had lost all value.

Espionage by its nature is confusing. Its certainties are variable and random and in his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor, confidence is a quality to be parodied. A pair of high-minded and fairly high-living Londoners — a university don and a barrister — decide to find a way of starting anew. To their astonishment the tennis- focused holiday which was to signal this change of tune introduces them to a Russian family apparently on the run from their homeland.