This was a tough book to review, so I had to step away for a bit, think about how I felt about the book ... and then we had our book club meeting, so I listened to what other people thought about it, stepped away again, and now I'm finally writing about it.

I like the other le Carré-based works with which I'm familiar (the book The Perfect Spy and the movie The Constant Gardner), so I thought this would be similar when I picked it up in the clearance section at Half Price Books. Ah, what I didn't know ... I should have trusted the bookstore.

It's one of le Carré's newest books, and as such, it's markedly different from the other titles I know about. This is about post-9/11 spying, and as such, it does two things: it paints a grimly realistic picture of how those games are played today, and it makes you take a look back at Cold War-era spy books and wonder if perhaps that was what was happening all the time then, too. (You're thinking James Bond, right? Remember, in the movies, he plays everyone, and is played himself frequently. We want to see him as the good guy, but he has an odd way of going about things, and of course innocent people always get swept up in his wake. Plus Ian Fleming's Bond was darker than the movie Bond.)

Part of that realism is the ham-handed way Americans deal with "terrorism" internationally. It's not hard to reconcile that with what we've read in the papers over the last 11 years or so, and

Spoiler

the climax of the book is all too easy to see: the Americans, after openly seething during a strategy meeting, storm in, shatter the carefully-laid plans of the Europeans, and sweep off their victims for extraordinary rendition

. The lack of subtlety and the "Our way is how it goes down" approach the Americans take in the book is much like what we know to be true; it is, however, a difficult pill to swallow when you realize what that means, that we, normal American people, are occasionally seen that way by people in other countries. (And why not? Those are, after all, the people with the biggest impact on their lives.)

So

Spoiler

the ending was difficult for me to read, and right away, I found it to be disappointing. Did it have to end that way? Yes, for le Carré to make his point, it did

.

The book is well-written and interesting ... but it's about a topic that isn't nearly as romantic and intriguing as it was, say, 30 years ago. Think about reading The Jungle within a decade after Sinclair wrote it. Would you become a vegetarian on the spot? You just might. Unfortunately, citizenship isn't easy to change ... and government is even harder to change. Two presidents with nearly polar opposite approaches to most other things seem to see no problems reaching over into other countries and doing as they see fit. With that in mind, could individual spies be expected to act any differently?