Le Carré's only non-spy novel

Le Carré’s attempt at a “grand literary novel” results in a peculiar book: overwritten, over the top, and unnecessarily forced in its literary ambitions. Where his spy fiction excels in economical, sparse prose, here he seems determined to prove that he can also write a novel about midlife crisis and existential struggle.

Le Carré’s strength lies in subtlety, in conjuring an entire world with a single sentence. Here, he does the exact opposite: everything must appear grand, dramatic, and literary, but in doing so, it loses impact.

That said, it is still a decent book, and its themes are based on Schiller’s essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”. In this essay, Schiller distinguishes between two kinds of artists: the naïve and the sentimental. The book’s title could therefore reflect a contradiction within a single person—protagonist Aldo Cassidy—but it could also apply to two figures, Cassidy and Shamus.

The book is a curiosity within le Carré’s oeuvre, and for that reason, worth reading. But it does not match the quality of his earlier (or later) works.