The Tailor Of Panama ebook

by John Le Carre

Le Carré’s evocation of Panama is rich in surreal detail and brilliantly rendered character; faced with such a barrage of style and skill, we willingly believe. Le Carré’s writerly skills are at work in The Tailor of Panama.

Le Carré’s evocation of Panama is rich in surreal detail and brilliantly rendered character; faced with such a barrage of style and skill, we willingly believe. The Vancouver Sun. Le Carré is at the top of his form in setting up this spy story about the creation-out of whole cloth, perhaps-of a spy story, a looking-glass world where the dupers and the duped are hard to tell apart. The pace is nonstop, scenes are cleanly and economically written, and flashbacks are incorporated seamlessly into the narrative. the conclusion, which probably should not come as a surprise, resoundingly does.

David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), better known by the pen name John le Carré (/ləˈkæreɪ/), is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author.

The Tailor of Panama is a 1996 novel by John le Carré. A 2001 film was released based on the novel. Harry Pendel is a British expatriate living in Panama City and running his own successful bespoke tailoring business Pendel and Braithwaite. His wife and children are unaware that almost every detail of his life is fabricated, including his former partner, Mr Braithwaite. In reality, Harry Pendel is an ex-convict who learnt tailoring in prison.

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The Tailor of Panama. Издательство: "Ballantine Books" (2015). David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré". His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller and remains one of his best known works. Following the novel's success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. In 1990, le Carré received the Helmerich Award which is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

So begins John le Carré’s dazzling new novel set in contemporary Panama, reluctant host and future owner of the second largest gateway to world trade. Harry Pendel, Jewish-Irish foster child, is the charismatic proprietor and guiding genius of Pendel and Braithwaite Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of Savile Row, through whose doors passes everyone who is anyone in Central America.

John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, is an English author of espionage novels. Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England. The Tailor of Panama is the author's 1996 novel.

In The Tailor Of Panama John Le Carré places Harry Pendel at the centre of the action. When trying to decide which book I found a recommendation online that listed The Tailor of Panama as one of Le Carre's top 4 books. If this is one of his best, I'd hate to read the ones not on the list. He is the tailor of the title, a crafter of quality bespoke outer garments, whose customers include some of the wealthiest and politically most significant actors in Panamanian society.

It was an ordinary day in Panama, until Andrew Osnard barged into Harry Pendel's shop, asking to be measured for a suit. Osnard, an old Etonian and a spy, is keeping a watchful eye on the handover of the Panama canal - and also intends to secure for himself the fortune that has so far eluded him. nnReviewnArguably his best book since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A masterful portrayal of human weaknesses (Brian Morton in Times Educational Supplement)nnDelightfully pointed and hilarious ...a well-crafted tale whose thread is studded with funny and moving episodes, as well as pointed asides (Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian)nnThis is a book with a momentum of its own, a romantic delirium for troubled times...The le Carré of his new book is a tough talker. (Karl Miller in The Observer)nnLe Carré is on top form - rich, subtle and powerfully imaginative. (Maxim magazine) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.nnReviewn'Le Carré shows what an extraordinarily witty writer he can be, with a true feeling for the farcical.' (The Sunday Times)nn'A masterful portrayal of human weakness.' (The Times Educational Supplement)

Cemav

This was one of the last of the many John Le Carre novels I have read. Inspired in part by Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." As in Greene's novel, this one ridicules the tendency of British intelligence services to accept questionable local Panamanian sources provided by Harry Pendel, an ex-convict British expatriate tailor who invents a Saville Row connection and a nonexistent mentor and former partner. He proceeds to invent a conspiracy involving students and fishermen trying to stop corrupt sale of the canal on the eve of the turnover of the canal to Panama around the time of its transfer from US control. A mysterious British intelligence service controlled by a Fleet Street press baron passes the information on to the US which mounts a second invasion of Panama. Le Carre has said he was inspired by his own constant reinventing and reimagining himself.

Uafrmaine

I've only read a few Le Carre novels in my life, and it's been years, if not decades, since the last. What I distinctly remember about the earlier reads was the appalling sadness of it all, how spying's general nature is the ruination of all good people involved.

You get that here, too, but the tone is somewhat different, with the post Cold War confusion of targets and allies and enemies creating as much farce as tragedy. I did laugh; people were destroyed; I got what I paid for.

I decided to try this novel because I was traveling to Panama, a country whose list of fiction, about or from, is so sparse as to contain arguably just the Tailor of Panama and not much else. It did help set the mood for me while I was there, but the lives of these people - the elite and expats and governors and the powerful - is so distant from a tourist like me that I might have been in a different country than the one in the book. Nevertheless, I did it. I went to the odd little country called Panama, read that one book, and enjoyed the experience overall.

Skillet

Just magic - there are scenes so rich that you'll never forget them. Le Carre wraps us in another masterpiece and the production and acting are so right! I don't buy movies but I had to have this at hand. You won't be sorry!

Skyway

I am a fan of John Le Carre but I can't say I like all of his books. He seems to have peaked somewhere between A Perfect Spy and The Little Drummer Girl. The Tailor of Panama, published in 1996, is one of his post-Cold War era books and contains his usual themes of betrayal and human weakness in the murky world of espionage. In his acknowledgements he admits to a desire to write a satire along the lines of Graham Greene's brilliant Our Man in Havana, a farcical look at a the consequences of fabricated intelligence. Le Carre looked around for a 1990s equivalent of Batista's Cuba and settled on Panama in the years just after the 1989 US invasion (Operation Just Cause). Le Carre did significant on-site research in Panama to prepare for this book. As a result, his insights into Panamanian culture, history and politics ring very true. The story involves a British ex-pat named Harry Pendel who runs a men's store right out of London's garment district called Pendel and Braithwaite Ltd ("Formerly of Savile Row"). As such he is tailor to the movers and shakers of Panamanian society; its politicians, its gangsters, its American occupiers, et al. But Pendel is living a fabricated life, with a fabricated past even his wife is unaware of. He is really a British ex-con who learned to make suits in prison and came to Panama to start all over again. Because of his secret past and mounting financial debts, the vulnerable Pendel is easily exploited by fledgling MI-6 agent and "Panama Canal expert" Andy Oxnard to serve as a British spy. The obnoxious Oxnard cultivates Pendel both as an agent and head of an agent network, using his substantial operational funding to pay for their secret double-life (and Oxnard's own out-of-control appetites), never realizing that Pendal's intelligence is fiction, based on innuendo, gossip and imagination; and his agent network nothing more than Pendel's unwitting friends and wife. The result is a tragic comedy of errors as the scam unravels, people die or are betrayed and the entire scheme is wiped away by another American invasion -- the result of Oxnard's bogus intelligence products.
This is not an easy book to read, a dark comedy at best. Le Carre's brilliant prose carries the day, but its high brow English prose, tough on an American ear. The post-Cold War liberal preachiness characterizing Le Carre's later books sometimes ruins the joke. The Americans are almost uniformly bad, card-board cut-out military types from Dr. Strangelove; the Brits are all cynical and inept (the most inept intelligence schemers since The Looking Glass War); the socialists and leftists are all wonderful and idealistic; and everyone is oversexed and cheating on their spouses -- a reflection of Le Carre's own lurid personal life. Le Carre's sense of comic timing starts out well -- this is high-end farce -- but as it moves towards its tragic conclusion it feels more and more forced. The idea that America is itching to re-invade Panama at the drop of a hat is a mean-spirited angle. But Le Carre has become crankier and more cynical with every outing (At least the liberal sermonizing isn't as bad as The Constant Gardner or The Mission Song). And his sense of humor, despite the cynicism, gives you a sense that he can still laugh at it all. But you won't feel better for having read this book. And time has left the book's rather obscure geo-political angle (an economic-expansionist Japan conspiring with a fragile Panamanian democracy against the West) far behind. For serious Le Carre fans only. The rest of you should move on to something more relevant... like an Andy McNab novel. Cheers!

Windworker

Now I understand a little better how we ended up in Iraq. Pierce Bronson exquisitely plays the perfect S.O.B. and Geoffrey Rush, as always, very successfully captures his character fearing the loss of the things he holds dear and how deep a person will go to keep their secrets, when backed in a corner.