The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

Pantani was tiny – he weighed just 57kg (9 stones) and was 5′8″ – but had an enormous power to weight ratio that made his a near ideal climber’s physique. He was known as ‘Il Pirata’ (The pirate) because of his penchant for bandanas and earrings, and a propensity to attack and attack again. These things made him an enormously popular rider.

Away from cycling, Pantani led a very troubled life, which increasingly revolved around prostitutes and drugs. In 1999, he was expelled from the Giro d’Italia following the conclusion of the penultimate stage while in an almost unassailable lead for the General Classification, and his career and life never recovered. In 2004, aged 34, he died in a tatty hotel room in Rimini of a massive overdose of cocaine.

Matt Rendell’s book is a very detailed account of Pantani’s life and career and contains a forensic account of his death. There is a very convincingly argued look at the evidence for Pantani’s use of doping products, extracted from databases used to track athletes’ performance and medical records of blood tests conducted prior to surgery. Every piece of evidence shows that Pantani’s hematocrit level followed a yearly pattern in which it peaked at levels rarely if ever seen in healthy individuals around the time of the Tour and dropped off afterwards, a pattern that would not be observed in even the most esoteric pathologies.

The weight of evidence is too great to dismiss, especially given that most of it does not relate specifically to doping controls and therefore would not have been subject to masking techniques that athletes use to fool testing regimes.

Many of Pantani’s contemporaries, Bjarne Riis and Richard Virenque for example, have subsequently admitted to their use of EPO, although Lance Armstrong continues to deny using it. Riis was stripped of his one Tour de France victory, and Pantani should be too. But, really, EPO use was so widespread at that time that it’s difficult to believe that there were any clean riders in the peloton.

Pantani denied using performance enhancing drugs and hinted repeatedly at some vast conspiracy to frame him. Needless to say, the only conspiracy was his own to cheat the authorities and, ultimately, the fans into believing that his performances were legitimate.

Rendell’s book forms an useful companion to David Millar’s excellent Racing Through the Dark for those seeking to understand the science and practice of blood doping. It is, however, a rather dense and repetitive book, not to mention a bleak one. Despite that, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in road cycling. It’s a desperately sad story, but one that needed to be told.

Related posts:

1. Racing Through the Dark by David Millar
2. We Were Young and Carefree by Laurent Fignon
3. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

Racing Through the Dark

David Millar
Orion 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £18.99

This is the kind of complicated story that the media doesn’t really like very much, hence the stupid coverage of the possibility of Millar’s lifetime Olympic ban being lifted, something that he has not sought, but which has come about because of a separate legal challenge to the legality of the BOA’s policy of lifetime bans.

Millar is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful guy, and his story is fascinating. It’s a surprise to find that his early experiences of being a pro cyclist were rather less organised than one might assume. He was largely left to construct his own training programme and travel arrangements and found it difficult to get the right equipment from his then team, Cofidis.

Today, teams like Team Sky have every single element of a cyclist’s training and preparation under microscopic control, so it’s interesting to see how slapdash methods were even as recently as the 1990s.

There’s also a darker side to this laissez-faire approach, which allows the rider to do things behind the team’s back, or for the team to have plausible deniability if a rider gets caught doping. The testing regime for cyclists is now far stricter, so the idea that a cyclist could simply disappear for a few weeks before the season for secret training is now impossible. But at the start of Millar’s career, this was the standard way to avoid testing; just turn off the mobile and keep a low profile and you were good so long as you weren’t caught red-handed.

Millar’s explanation of the subtle pressure that a team can exert on a young rider is fascinating. At no stage was there ever a conversation along the lines of “hey David, we’d like you to start using EPO”. Rather, they questioned his commitment to correct “preparation”, a loaded word that is used as a code for doping. “Have you done everything possible to prepare? Are you properly prepared?” Doping is simply seem as part of being a professional. Everyone else is doing it, so isn’t it wrong that your results should suffer? Aren’t you letting your teammates down?

Eventually, Millar succumbed not only to the vitamin injections he had previously resisted but also to the lure of outright cheating. This involved him visiting a doctor in Italy and following a regimen of EPO injections and hard training. When returning from his purdah, his performances were markedly improved.

Unlike other riders, though, his cheating did not last very long. He was arrested in Biarritz while having dinner with David Brailsford, now Performance Director of British Cycling and General Manager of Team Sky. Although this was embarrassing for Brailsford, who has a hardline anti-doping stance, he stood by Millar.

Since being caught, Millar has, unlike other exposed cheats, admitted fully what he did and become a forceful and eloquent advocate of clean cycling. Because of his doping ban, he’s not eligible to race with Team Sky or, as I mentioned above, the UK Olympic team, even though he’s now known to be clean. He accepts this, and is quick to emphasise the fortunate position he’s in as a professional cyclist. At no stage does he try to shirk responsibility, and he’s excellent on how the culture of silence about doping is so harmful to the sport in general.

Millar’s book is very well-written, insightful and paints a fascinating picture of what life is like inside a pro cycling team, and is one of the only honest accounts of doping in professional sport available. If you’re interested at all in road racing, or doping in sport more generally, I’d recommend this book unreservedly.

Related posts:

1. It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn
2. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting
3. Take Your Eye Off The Ball by Pat Kirwan (Shane’s book four, 2011)

How I Won the Yellow Jumper

Ned Boulting
Yellow Jersey 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £12.99

I find Boulting’s writing almost unbearable, mainly because it’s exactly like hearing him speak, only it’s directly inside your brain. He’s one of those commentators who loves to point out what to the intellectually lazy seem like portentous parallels between two happenings despite there being no causal relationship at all. You know the kind: “the last time Barcelona played Man United on a Tuesday night, a short man with a bad hair cut scored the winner. Can Nani emulate Messi tonight?” or some shite like that.

Given that sports presentation is an almost exclusively male preserve (why?), it’s perhaps not surprising that banter seems to constitute 90% of a commentator’s verbal armoury. It’s wearing enough when you have to listen to it, but when every single page sounds like this, it’s almost impossible to take.

Boutling has always seemed like someone who does very little preparation, and that turns out to be spot on. Amazingly, this is consistently held up as hilarious rather than evidence of rank unprofessionalism; the title of the book is a reference to him saying ‘yellow jumper’ on air rather than ‘yellow jersey’ because of how little he knew when first asked to join the ITV cycling team. Muddling through is seen as worthy, in stark contrast to the preparedness of the athletes participating in the race.

This is a generalised problem with sports presentation in Britain. Ignorance that would be completely unacceptable in an American Baseball or NFL commentator is all too common here, to the extent that it’s difficult to think of any decent commentators at all. Insightful coverage of sport can be found if you look hard enough (especially online), but next to none of it makes it onto the TV, where platitudes, cliché and received wisdom rule.

Sport writing is also stuffed full of terrible prose, and Boulting’s is no exception:

What could possibly be gained from dragging both of us into discussions about the white chocolate chips in the muffin that sat glowering on a saucer in the middle of the table?

How on earth is it possible for a muffin to glower? This kind of thing is what Boulting mistakes for sophisticated writing, but it just grates every time. Only very rarely does he find an apposite metaphor. Almost every sentence could do with editing:

The wine, a bottle of Château du Val de Mercy (one of the rare occasions on which I actually committed to memory a memorable bottle of wine) was as beautiful to drink as French wine often is.

That sentence is replete with errors. By definition, memorable bottles of wine are committed to memory; he means he committed the name, which is different. Then it sounds like he’s saying that the bottle of wine was an occasion, whereas if he’d said “this was one of the rare occasions” he could have cleared up that ambiguity. Finally, his description of the quality of the wine is circular: a bottle of French wine is as beautiful to drink as French wine can be, which while unarguable is also not useful information or even a compliment (it would be true if French wine was routinely hideous).

Further on he refers to French policemen possessing “purposeful briefcases”, which is either a strange formulation or an under-reported technical breakthrough in the field of attaché case design. I wouldn’t nitpick like this if the entire book wasn’t infested with this type of mind-numbing stuff.

Sadly, whatever value there is in Boulting’s story is thoroughly occluded by his terrible prose. If you want to learn about the Tour, there are plenty of better books than this.

No related posts.

It’s All About the Bike

Robert Penn
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 208 pages, £8.99

Before long I was going on reasonably long rides and within six months had completed my first 100 mile sportive. Now, I ride at every opportunity, doing at least 40 miles at the weekend whenever I can get the time. What is it about cycling that’s so addictive? I set out to read as much as I could about this remarkable machine and its aficionados.

Robert Penn’s book is about building a bike out of the best possible components from around the world. This doesn’t mean that the result is something that you’d find being raced in the Tour de France; rather it’s something that is precisely tailored to the rider’s taste, shape and riding style.

Get a group of cyclists together and you can start a debate about just about any component of a bike, from gears to brakes, to saddles, to handlebars to the material used to make the frame. It’s a remarkable fact that although there are dozens of options for each of these components and more, the bike remains pretty similar to its earliest ancestor machines in many respects.

Penn devotes a chapter to each major decision that needs to be made when custom making a bike. For his frame, he chooses steel, which while simultaneously classic and trendy is not the lightest or most up to date material. It does look and feel great though.

One of the joys of the book is the time Penn gives to the master craftsmen who sweat the details of what makes a perfect seat post, bottom bracket, saddle or wheel. Their dedication to a niche of a niche is truly inspiring. Most bikes today are made out of cheap commodity parts, but if you’re prepared to pay, you can have beautifully made components made by people who know exactly what they’re doing. By and large his custom build is in impeccable taste, but the paint job of blue and orange sounds genuinely awful.

There’s more to this than simply a bike geek’s tour of the world though. Penn also shows how the bike has developed over the years in each of the major component groups, never assuming too much knowledge of the reader. And for those in the know, there’s greater depth and the odd amusing aside (like his remark that Johan Bruyneel, Lance Armstrong’s coach, ‘knows that success in road cycling is all about scientific precision’).

I doubt you’ll get much out of this book if you’re not already interested in cycling, and road cycling in particular, but if you are, I should warn you that should not be surprised to find yourself firing up every custom bike configurator you can find in your browser, which can become a very expensive habit if you click the ‘buy’ button too often…

No related posts.

Memoirs of a Master Forger

William Heaney
Gollancz 2009, Paperback, 320 pages, £7.99

Some time ago I stumbled across a blog post by Joyce in which he explained that the success of the novel had been somewhat galling. It had better reviews than Joyce’s previous work and went into reprint in its second week – a feat that none of his other books had managed. Joyce wrote: “It confirms some rather worrying trends in publishing.”

Would this book have been just as successful if it had been released under Joyce’s name? He thinks it is unlikely. Without any preconceptions about the author, critics and booksellers had to take William Heaney’s ‘debut’ at face value. A new Graham Joyce novel has critics digging through the old reviews and booksellers reaching for the previous sales data.

It is a fascinating experiment but I found the book itself to be unremarkable. William Heaney, the central character and supposed author, is a borderline alcoholic who works for a youth organisation and, in his spare time, sells forged books and donates the proceeds to charity. He also either sees demons or has a mental illness that leads him to believe that he does.

The demons have been around since a distressing incident at college, which is recounted in flashback. The donations to charity are, in some ways, an act of penance for what happened when he was younger. They are also partly driven by the fact that Heaney is, despite the criminal activity, a kind and decent person.

William’s wife has left him and the separation has caused tension between him and his children. He falls into a relationship with a younger woman, Yasmin, though he feels uncomfortable at the age gap and her pursuit of him. For things to work out, William will have to confront his demons.

Do you see what Joyce has done there? He’ll have to confront his demons. His demons. Yes, the metaphor is a little heavy-handed.

Joyce says that the book contains a critique of the publishing industry. There is a satire of British Council-supported poetry and, obviously, the novel is filled with fake books as well as – apparently – a demon that lives in a manuscript. It doesn’t really amount to a critique, though.

The problem is that this is part thriller, part romance and part satire but doesn’t fully convince as any of those things. The threads about demons and forgeries seem to be building towards a tense conclusion that never arrives. Instead, everything is tied up with very little trouble. So much for the thriller.

The romance, too, is pretty simple. Two likeable people want to get together and there are no significant obstacles to that. Jolly good. And the satire just isn’t sharp enough.

Nevertheless, Joyce writes very well and Heaney is an amusing, interesting character whose observations are often enjoyable.

Related posts:

1. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Shane’s book 7, 2011)
2. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (Shane’e book 5, 2011)
3. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape 2011, Hardcover, 160 pages, £12.99

Sadly that is very much the case here. In many ways The Sense of an Ending reminds me of Graham Swift’s horrendously smug and pointless Tomorrow. While it’s not as bad as that, I certainly didn’t enjoy it very much.

Like Tomorrow, The Sense of an Ending revolves around a secret that is supposed to be so terrible that we are meant to be outraged and shocked when it is revealed, whereas in both cases my reaction was “is that it?”. (At least, it seems that way. If not, why be so coy about the secret as to leave it to the final pages before it is revealed?)

The book is written in the first person, and the narrator’s voice is very pooterish. The idea, I think, is that we’re supposed to think of him as someone who’s a bit naive, which I did, but also someone for whom we have a degree of sympathy. On the contrary, I found him boring, unremarkable and rather prim, and those feelings got in the way of having much sympathy for him.

While I’m certain it’s possible to write a brilliant novel about someone so boring, this one isn’t it. I’d recommend giving it a miss.

A brief note on the physical form of this book. I bought the first edition, which is, as is customary with Julian Barnes’ books, beautifully made. The cut edges are black and, although contributing to the expectation that something more remarkable is going to be found in its pages, this and the all-too-rare sown binding make this a lovely object.

Why aren’t all first editions made with this kind of attention to detail? Now that e-books are gaining such ground, is it too much to hope that physical books will be produced with more care?

No related posts.

Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.

In common with a lot of other 19th century cookbooks (this is, in fact, a sort of greatest hits anthology. Pellegrino Artusi, the author, is best known for Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, published in 1891) there is a lot of knowledge assumed and your hand isn’t as tightly held as it might be by modern writers, keen to pick up where Delia Smith left off. In some recipes the technique is barely touched upon, although he does at least give comprehensive lists of ingredients, complete with quantities.

In describing the pleasure of eating, though, he’s completely at home and prone to long, deliriously happy passages about how much he loves to tuck in. The cuisine is Italian and some well-known dishes such as minestrone (complete with an anecdote about cholera) and cacciucco are here, but there’s very little of the pasta and risotto varieties that modern italian cooks go for. Little birds abound, as do almonds and spices but you won’t be reading this in the kitchen anyway so the actual ingredients don’t matter so much. This is a book for reading. For example:

‘All you drinkers out there can put your forks down; this herring is not for your jaded palates.’ (from ‘Civilised herring’)

‘Dear Mr Meat Loaf, please come forward, do not be shy. I wish to introduce you to my readers. I know that you are modest and humble because, given your background, you feel inferior to many others. But take heart and do not doubt that with a few words in your favour you shall find someone who wants to taste you and who might even reward you with a smile.’

‘Cheer up, for if you eat these cookies you will never die, or you will live as long as Methuselah.’ (From ‘Health cookies’)

All of the above recipes are just about possible to cook from the information given, but only if you fill in the gaps yourself. Cooking, as Artusi says, is a troublesome sprite, especially if you try to cook from this book. Reading, however, is a delight.

Nose to Tail Eating is playful and spirited in its own way but rejects Artusi’s frilly style in favour of beautifully executed brevity and simplicity. Each page has a list of ingredients on the left, a paragraph or two of explanation in bold on the right followed by some idiosyncratic but exact instructions below.

Nose to Tail Eating

Anthony Bourdain (Introduction)
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2004, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

The cuisine here is British, and the comparison in style between the two books illustrates the differences in the food perfectly. Where Exciting Food For Southern Types is rambling and drawn-out like a long lunch in the sun, Nose to Tail Eating gets straight down to the business of cramming as much deliciousness as possible onto one plate. It’s hungry and eager where Artusi is verbose and anecdotal.

Which isn’t to say it’s unsophisticated, but it’s a modern, British sophistication that contrasts sharply with Victorian-era Italy. The style of writing reflects the restaurant, St John, that the recipes come from. It’s funny and readable (the recipe for haggis, in particular, is wonderful) but you could cook from it every day and be very well fed indeed.

The authors of Canteen: Great British Food clearly love St John and have taken its message that simple British food has nothing to be ashamed of to heart. Their restaurants offer good food and they can show you how to make some really excellent piccalilli but I can’t work out if their hearts are really in it.

Canteen

Patrick Clayton-Malone
Ebury Press 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £17.99

British food is clearly fashionable, and it’s hard to know how to feel about that. On the one hand it might speak of a nation at ease with its own identity, happy to live in its own house instead of constantly aspiring to recreate the food of its neighbours, or it could just be irony making its way onto our tables.

I strongly hope not. To take your own cuisine and offer it with a knowing wink rather than a genuine belief that a good meat pie can be as delicious as bouillabaisse is a cowardly betrayal. Food, especially restaurants and publishing, can be faddy and capricious and that can lead to centuries of tradition and quiet good work being consumed in the fire of reviews and development meetings. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I’m absolutely certain it’s not at St John. Fingers crossed, and bon appetit.

Related posts:

1. Edwardian Entertaining by Christine Smeeth (Ian’s book 2, 2011)
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and All About Steve by Fortune Magazine (Shane’s books 36 and 38, 2011)
3. The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri (Ian’s book 4, 2011)

The Games That Changed the Game

Ron Jaworski
ESPN Books 2011, Paperback, 312 pages, £10.22

In this book, Jaworski looks at seven NFL games that he believes represent important moments in the tactical development of the sport. He gives the background to the coaches and players involved and then examines the film of the game to explain how the tactical innovation in question played out.The tactical to-and-fro of an NFL game is what makes the sport so absorbing for me and Jaworski captures it perfectly here. There is a narrative to an NFL game that isn’t always apparent, even to seasoned observers, and this book does an excellent job of making those narratives clear.

Jaworski explains, for example, that coaches don’t always pick plays because they expect to score with them, or even gain a lot of yards. He writes:

“An offense will run plays that you know aren’t going to pick up much yardage, but you have to run them to set up another play for down the road. You run certain plays to see how the defense reacts. You show certain fomations to help a quarterback understand how defenders will line up against that formation.”

It’s here that Jaworski’s experience as a quarterback becomes relevant. He has been on the field and played the game at the highest level. When he tells you what it’s like to try to read a defense or to attempt to avoid a pass rush, you can trust that he knows what he’s talking about.

Using a specific game to explain a tactical innovation is slightly forced because in almost every case the tactics under consideration did not suddenly appear, fully-formed, in one game. They were developed over a series of games – or even over years. However, the advantage of this approach is that makes very clear how the tactics work in practice.

Jaworski’s play-by-play is frequently riveting. At times, he manages to create the excitement of watching the game itself. The only downside was that I wanted to watch the tape while I read his analysis. This can be done with enhanced ebooks and it’s to be hoped that publishers will try to sort out the licensing deals to make that possible in future.

There are also lots of brilliant anecdotes in amid the description. Jaworski explains how Sid Gillman consulted a maths professor to work out geometrically where each receiver should be on the field so that the ball would be in the air for the same amount of time, whichever one the quarterback passed to.

There are some wonderful quotes too. Here’s Jim Otto, the Oakland Raiders center:

“At the end of one run, Joe Greene cussed me out, then kicked me square in the testicles – and I’ve never forgotten that. I didn’t think that was very nice.”

Some of the tactical developments that Jaworski covers here were so significant that they changed the type of players that teams looked for. In some cases, they even resulted in rule changes by the league, because a new idea tipped the balance of the game too far towards the offense or defense.

Though Jaworski has two co-writers on this book, the writing and editing are often poor. There are exclamation marks all over the place, for example, which is irritating. And it’s repetitive: occasionally you’ll read a sentence that repeats, almost a word-for-word, one from a few pages earlier.

Though it would be nice to have better prose, that isn’t the selling point of a book like this. It’s all about the expertise and Jaworski has buckets of it. This is a book that will deepen your understanding of the game. An essential for every fan.

Related posts:

1. Take Your Eye Off The Ball by Pat Kirwan (Shane’s book four, 2011)
2. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (Shane’s book 21, 2011)
3. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)

Super Crunchers

Ian Ayres
John Murray 2008, Paperback, 272 pages, £9.99

Ayres at least has an interesting story to tell. The rise in the practice of analysing large data sets is changing the way many areas of our lives work, from finance to medicine, shopping to wine criticism. These changes are profound and although they will help us to make better decisions, they will also make a lot of people uncomfortable, not least those who consider themselves experts.We meet a man who created a formula for predicting the quality of wine years before it became drinkable and a man who has developed a computer programme that takes a person’s symptoms and generates a comprehensive list of possible illnesses.

What Ayres calls ’super crunching’ works by taking a set of criteria – a list of symptoms, for example – and checking it against a massive data set, such as a list of known medical conditions, to generate results that would have been almost impossible to produce manually. Various statistical techniques, such as regression analysis, are used to determine which criteria are relevant to the required outcome and these can then be assembled into a formula.

Obviously, this is the same role performed by a doctor, who uses training and experience to assess symptoms and make a diagnosis. However, human beings a not perfect reasoning machines. We tend to overestimate the significance of coincidences, for example, and to assume that patterns we have seen before will repeat themselves.

Computers don’t do that. They deliver results based purely on the data. Of course, that means they are only as good as the data they are given and the criteria by which they assess it. Ayres makes clear that determining the factors to measure is still a job for a skilled human, as is deciding how to act on the results.

For example, it’s possible to determine the likelihood that a convicted criminal will re-offend. Does that mean it is reasonable not to release those who have a high likelihood of re-offending? Most people would say no. Since all we can determine is a likelihood, we would be keeping locked up some people who would not have re-offended and that would be unfair.

Nevertheless, Ayres shows how some are using the results of data analysis in ways that most of us would consider to be unfair. Retailers are increasingly realising that they can determine how much a shopper would be willing to pay. That means instead of offering everyone the same price, they will charge each customer as much as they can get away with. If you demonstrate that you don’t mind paying high prices then you can expect to be charged accordingly. The only answer, Ayres says, is for consumers to educate themselves.

Ayres has lots of examples but over 272 pages his material wears thin and he ends up repeating himself. Once you understand the concepts at work here, it doesn’t really require an entire chapter to detail how the concept applies to a different field.

Furthermore, Ayres’s central concept is a little fuzzy. There is no precise definition of ’super crunching’. When does mere ‘crunching’ become ’super’? When the data set is of a certain size? When it’s done by a computer? Ayres doesn’t give a clear answer because there isn’t one. The form of these kind of non-fiction books requires Ayres to act as if we have just passed a pivotal moment in history, when in fact these techniques have been progressing over many decades and will continue to do so.

Still, Ayres is very readable and the subject is fascinating. Those who enjoyed Freakonomics or who are intrigued by the idea that statistically analysis can uncover ‘hidden truths’ should give this a read.

Related posts:

1. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Shane’s book 7, 2011)
2. German Modernism: Music and the Arts by Walter Frisch (James’s book 6, 2011)
3. Afghanistan by Stephen Tanner (Sara’s book 4, 2011)

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carré
Sceptre 2009, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

When Issa Karpov, a young Chechen with links to Islamist terrorists, arrives in Hamburg, he immediately draws the interest of the intelligence services. The Germans are keen to erase memories their failure to detect the Hamburg-based group that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US. They want better intelligence sources to help spot future plots.

The British, meanwhile, are interested because of Karpov’s father, who was a Russian officer. Lurking in the background are the Americans, who want to use extraordinary rendition to remove Karpov to their own facilities to find out what he knows.

These forces largely play out in the background as Le Carre focuses his attention on Tommy Brue, who runs a British family bank in Hamburg, and Annabel Richter, the human rights lawyer who represents Karpov.

Karpov’s father was a customer of Brue’s bank and Richter hopes that the money the bank owe’s to Issa can be used to keep him out of the hands of the intelligence services and give him legal status in Germany.

Le Carre’s central trio, Brue, Richter and Karpov, are all well drawn. Brue, cuckolded, estranged from his daughter and laden with guilt over the customers his father brought to the bank, sees Issa as a chance for redemption. Richter seeks to make amends for a previous case in which she believes that she failed.

Issa, meanwhile, is harder to read. Angry and vulnerable, determined to be a devout Muslim but unsure what that means. He ricochets between those who seek to help him and those who would harm him.

The supporting cast are a little more cliched, particularly Gunther Bachmann, the German intelligence man who leads the operation to find Karpov. He’s a tough, charming workaholic who doesn’t respect authority or play by the book. The kind of character you’ve seen in dozens of spy novels, in other words.

Le Carre moves the pieces of his plot into place slowly, before the whole thing snaps shut abruptly. The ending is so abrupt, in fact, that it feels a little unsatisfying. A chapter expounding on the conclusion would have been welcome but it would also, perhaps, have undermined Le Carre’s point. It’s hard to say more without giving away the ending but the way that Le Carre closes the book puts the reader in a similar position to the characters.

Like a lot of Le Carre’s work, this is a very moral book. Once again, he shows how individuals can be helpless victims in the face of an espionage complex that ruthlessly pursues its larger objectives.

This isn’t in the same class as the other Le Carre novels that I’ve read but it is an engaging book that tells a powerful story.

Related posts:

1. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (Shane’e book 5, 2011)
2. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
3. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins (Shane’s book 35, 2011)