A Perfect Spy is great.

I recently finished A Perfect Spy by John le Carré. It was a great book.

One interesting thing of note is that this book, the author had stated, is semi-autobiographical. The main character's life matched le Carré's nearly completely, save for the treason part (bro wrote a book as therapy). And the main character kills himself in the end. (I don't consider this a spoiler because you don't need to be even halfway through the book to know that the main character fully intended to do this and there's nothing anyone else could've done to stop it.)

He said it's what he would've went through if he had stayed in the MI6. Why did he leave? Kim Philby blew him, LMAO.

The book's main character is Magnus Pym, a British intelligence officer. His dad, Richard Pym, was a con man. (Guess what le Carré's dad was.) The book focuses on Magnus's relationship with his father figures, which there are two of, but the second one is technically a spoiler?

It takes place after Rick died. Magnus flew back to England from Vienna, where he was stationed, to attend his funeral. But after that he just disappeared. Because he ran off to a little town to write letters to his son Tom, named after his grandfather, and his boss literally named Brotherhood, perhaps for a specific reason but I don't know. The book alternates between chapters of Pym's letters, where the author uses a very interesting point-of-view; and chapters in the perspective of other people, like his wife Mary and boss Brotherhood, as they go looking for him.

The points of view in Pym's letters is very interesting and made it quite hard to comprehend at first. So, it's written by Pym, recounting Pym's own past, for either Tom or Brotherhood and for some of them it's kind of unclear to whom a certain letter is addressed. Maybe if I reread it it would become clearer. Yet, Pym uses the third person to refer to himself. But he also uses the first person too. It was kind of confusing at first, but then I realized that the third-person "he" Pym is Pym at the time the stuff taken place, and the first-person "I" Pym is the current Pym. Well to be honest I could be wrong, but it seems like it. I'd have to actually reread to check. (I'm only even writing this post to get my mind off of that terrible book written by a certain ZXR, which honestly I should do more of. Positivity instead of negativity!) The "he" Pym only knows what he knows at that time, as a teenager, young adult, etc.. The "I" Pym knows everything the fifty-year-old current Pym knows, sitting in his room in that little town.

And there's "you," Brotherhood. It's clear that letters with "you" that's clearly referring to Brotherhood are addressed to him, but I don't really recall him addressing Tom with "you." Hang on, is Brotherhood also a father figure to Pym? I don't know girl, bro's daddy issues run deep.

A lot of the messaging in not only this book but also many of his other books were a lot of "the Empire is no more, we just work for the Americans now!!" But the Americans always appear in some nearly comedic way. Like when an American says the word "gentlemen," the author spells it as "junnlemen." (It only happened twice but it's still kinda funny.)

All in all A Perfect Spy is a really good read, although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone new to le Carré. Start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold if you want to get into his works. I'd be reading The Russia House next.

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