2024/072: The Russia House — John Le Carré

2024/072: The Russia House — John Le Carré

'Turn on your television set, what do you see? The leaders of both sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day. Hooray, it’s all over! Bollocks. Listen to the insiders and you realise the picture hasn’t altered by a brush-stroke.’
‘And if I turn my television off? What will I see then?’
He had ceased to smile. Indeed his good face was more serious than I had ever seen it before, though his anger – if such it was – seemed to be directed at no one but himself. ‘You’ll see us. Hiding behind our grey screens. Telling each other we keep the peace.’ [p. 414]

Moscow in 1987: Niki Landau, a rep for a small British publisher, is handed a manuscript by a mysterious Russian woman, who asks him to give it to his boss. The manuscript is no modern Russian novel, though, but a dossier of top secret material written by a disillusioned physicist, going by the name Goethe, who met Landau's boss -- the dissolute, eccentric, jazz-loving Barley Blair -- at a previous publishing event. ( Read more... )