PositiveThe New York Time Book ReviewLe Carré favors the close third person, but every point of view has just enough opacity that readers can never be sure they’ve seen everything ... Typically, le Carré’s narrative warheads are lodged in his endings. The novels patiently build up to a final explosion, leaving readers with a greater sense of dismay than of triumph. Endings, for le Carré, were reckonings. This slender volume (just over 200 pages) does conclude, rather abruptly, but it lacks what le Carré has taught us to expect of an ending. You can wonder, indeed, whether he had quite got around to finishing the book ... if Silverview feels less than fully executed, its sense of moral ambivalence remains exquisitely calibrated. Besides, novelists of le Carré’s stature are not diminished by their lesser efforts; Henry James closed his career not with his masterly The Golden Bowl but the wanly schematic The Outcry. The Republic of Literature has room for both.
Joseph Kanon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat may sound melodramatic in summary becomes, in the execution, gripping and authentic. That’s because of Joseph Kanon’s mastery of the quotidian detail in The Accomplice, of the small frictions and sparks of human relationships. And his crisp dialogugue ... The historical thriller is thus drawn to the unexplored interstices, the dank crevices of history. This is where Kanon’s imagination flourishes. Here we get to explore what might have happened if Josef Mengele were actually kidnapped, instead of dying a free man while swimming off the coast of Brazil ... If the ethical calculus is murky, the narrative propulsion is clear. The result is a thoroughly satisfying piece of entertainment that extends a tentacle into some serious moral reflection.
