The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

'A work of rare brilliance' The Times

Charmer, fabulist and tailor to Panama's rich and powerful, Henry Pendel loves to tell stories. But when the British spy Andrew Osnard - a man of large appetites, for women, information and above all money - walks into his shop, Henry's fantastical inventions take on a life of their own. Soon he finds himself out of his depth in an international game he can never hope to win.

Le Carré's savage satire on the espionage trade is set in a corrupt universe without heroes or honour, where the innocent are collateral damage and treachery plays out as tragic farce.

'A tour de force in which almost every convention of the classic spy novel is violated' The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction, Espionage, Thriller, Mystery, Spy Thriller, Crime, Mystery Thriller

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 14, 1996

About the author

John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is best book about bullshit I’ve ever read. It is a wonderfully dry satire on Britain’s inept attempts to overreach itself in foreign affairs. The setting is Panama in the late 1990s and the fate of the canal is a hot topic of discussion. Back in Britain, a shadowy cabal decides that a new listening post should be opened there, so they select a fleshy twentisomething public school boy for the job. Of course they do. Andrew Osnard, as he is called, arrives in Panama and recruits a tailor named Harry Pendel to start a network. Unfortunately everyone is lying to each other and also themselves, leaving the actual fate of Panama in other hands. Osnard and Pendel are a fascinating pair, both exhibiting a range of flaws. Their manipulations lay bare the hypocrisies of the British class system, as well as the ease with which these hypocrisies are exported.

It took me a while to get into the novel at first, as some time is expended initially on scene-sitting. I was immersed by page 100, however. Once the reader starts to realise just how much lying is going on, the novel becomes darkly hilarious and very entertaining. It is profoundly cynical throughout. As an example, on Osnard’s younger days:

He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media class.

Ultimately, geopolitics consists of many flawed humans with incomplete information attempting to survive and promote their preferred ends. It is thus profoundly chaotic. Le Carré conveys this in an appealing, deadpan fashion.

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed previous spy thrillers by John le Carré, so perhaps it was just me, and my distracted circumstances while reading this book, but I found it to be dull and rather a slog.

Somehow I forced myself to finish it, imagining that it had to get better. It did not.

[fleurette · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I was younger, I almost never left a book unfinished once I started it, no matter how boring or unappealing I found it. This habit likely stemmed from my school days when required reading was often dull but mandatory. When I was fifteen, my mother and I went on a two-week vacation abroad. Kindles were unheard of back then, so we brought only two paperbacks. One of them was by John le Carré. I finished the other book in the first two days, leaving me with twelve days and only le Carré's book to read. I couldn't get through it. I didn't even make it past the first fifty pages. I read every magazine I could get my hands on, regardless of my interest in the content. I even tackled two newspapers in foreign languages I didn’t speak and struggled through a dull romance novel in English, which I wasn't fluent in at the time. But in two weeks, I couldn't bring myself to finish le Carré's book. Incredibly bored and having no other option, I still couldn't read this book.

Now, much older, I decided to give le Carré another try and picked up one of his most famous novels, The Tailor of Panama. Oh, no no no no. Nothing has changed over the years. I still can't get through his books. I pushed myself as hard as I could, reaching a little over 40%, but the thought of reading the remaining 60% was enough to make me feel miserable.

I can't even pinpoint exactly what bothers me. I think it's his writing style, which stretches on like gum stuck under a chair, dull like a twelve-hour flight with the confusion of jet lag, and occasionally pseudo-poetic like the awkward poems of a thirteen-year-old. In short, it's one of the most boring things I've read recently.

The plot and characters don't redeem the situation. The plot may still be there, but the action is completely missing. Everything drags on. At a snail's pace. Scene after scene. Little by little. One meaningless conversation after another. Unhurriedly. Occasionally, there's a subplot meant to add depth to the story and characters, but what story, I ask? And of course, there are flashbacks, as if everything wasn't slow enough already. Christ, how slow it is! If you can handle this pace, you might even enjoy the book, but I couldn't stand it. After reading one page I was so bored that I couldn't bring myself to read the next one.

The thing is, Harry Pendel is quite an interesting character. But the writing style killed any desire I had to follow his actions. There was also something that irritated and upset me. Though I can't say exactly what.

I seriously considered forcing myself to finish this book, but the experience was so unpleasant that I decided to abandon it. Le Carré is probably just not for me. I doubt I'll ever read another of his books or finish this one. In fact, I'm so uninterested in the story that I don't even feel like watching the movie to find out how it all ends.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had me in stitches. Yes, le Carre can be very funny.

Aside from this book being hilarious I was caught by the story and wanted to finish it quickly. I also enjoyed the way how le Carre employed spycraft in this story.

If you need a thrilling humour break, give this story a go.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between February 2017 and September 2017 I read the entire George Smiley series. Having reached the end of the series, I was left wondering about John le Carré's life and work, and whether to read other books by him, and so I read ‘John le Carré: The Biography’ by Adam Sisman in April 2018. ‘John le Carré: The Biography’ convinced me I should probably read everything John le Carré has ever written, and so it was I came to 'The Tailor Of Panama' (1996) my first non-Smiley JLC book.

It is very clever and darkly comic. Harry Pendel is the titular tailor of Panama, ostensibly a quality bespoke tailor whose customers include some of the movers and shakers in Panamanian society. Andrew Osnard, a Thatcherite intelligence operator, more interested in getting rich quick than serving his country, recognises Pendel's potential as a spy and proceeds to blackmail him into taking the job. Sadly, Pendel's intelligence is more imagined than real and this is the springboard for a complex, insightful and meandering plot.

As always, beneath the beautiful descriptions of people, places, interactions and character, there is a darkly compelling narrative that shines a harsh and illuminating light on greed, opportunism, fear, expediency, modern geopolitics and stupidity. How those in power seek to justify their actions and mistakes, and how Britain tries vainly to come to terms with its diminished global role in a post-Imperial world.

Another JLC winner.

4/5

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of The Tailor Of Panama John Le Carré acknowledges his debt to a previous work that presented a similar theme, Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana. Both books are about the oxymoron that we call intelligence, so often self-contradictory because the label is only useful when there’s a lack of it. Such gaps need to be filled, and when we don’t have sufficient material it might be necessary to invent a little, just to keep everyone happy. And such is the plot of The Tailor Of Panama, who constructs his own reality, tailors his own design to ensure his paymasters get what they want. The irony of the situation lies, of course, in the fact that intelligence is most useful in those areas where those who desire it possess the least knowledge, thus opening up multiple avenues for fabrication without fear of contradiction.

In The Tailor Of Panama John Le Carré places Harry Pendel at the centre of the action. 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. The idea that floats in and out of the plot is the possibility, surely only ever imagined, that on expiry of the Canal Treaty a Southern-Eastern initiative will seek to construct a new canal to undercut the original by reducing transit times. The strategic interest that the original canal represented would, of course, accrue to the new grouping. And it is this aspect that certain intelligence circles cannot stomach.

It falls to one Andrew Osnard, a rather overweight English slob, to investigate, to commission and to gather intelligence on the matter. At the outset, Osnard calls on Pendel, ostensibly in seek of some expensive suits, but there is recruitment in the air. Quite why it would be the British rather than their American masters who would be involved is one of the book’s less convincing angles, but then part of the novel’s raison d’etre is to portray such potentially serious activity as riddled with actual farce. The problem eventually is that the farce can turn serious at any point, and not only for those directly involved.

The specific problem for Harry Pendel, British tailor, formerly of Savile Row, London, is that, despite his prowess with the cloth, thread and scissor, he is a man with form of another kind. He also needs the dosh, having entered a deal or two beyond his means and found himself out of a pocket he did not stitch. He is well connected, not only via his own elite customers, but also by virtue of his wife’s connections courtesy of her employer. Even his assistant has a bone to pick with her country’s political past, and she still bears the scars of previous activity. Thus Pendel becomes a chosen one, a member of a select team that simply has to deliver.

A review of The Tailor Of Panama should not divulge any detail of the book’s plot since, despite John Le Carré’s often beautiful characterisation and description, it’s what happens within these pages that is eventually important. Suffice it so say that, of course, not everything turns out as the reader, or even the protagonists might have expected. But then, after all, if we did have the knowledge we needed to predict, we would not need to seek out intelligence to fill the gaps.

The Tailor Of Panama is perhaps a tad over-long, and at least some of the diversions seem rather artificial. But surely in the real world, if anything in today’s surveillance society remains under-documented, there still exists the need for those in power to embroider, to decorate for public consumption, to add justification’s weight to flimsy evidence. It’s not only novelists who make things up.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, intelligent, character based, satirical spy novel about Harry Pendel, an exclusive tailor to Panama’s most powerful men. He becomes an informant to British Intelligence. The novel is set in corrupt Panama. Harry is recruited by Andrew Osnard, a British spy who wants inside information on the plot to sell the Panama Canal to the highest bidder. Harry finds himself embellishing the little information he comes by through his contacts.

Harry is married to Louisa. He has used her money to invest in farming property that has turned out to be a very poor buy. Accordingly Harry is easily persuaded to provide information to Andrew Osnard, given the substantial money Osnard pays Harry for the information.

What initially seems easy money to Harry, becomes fraught with problems, particularly in relation to his marriage to Louisa, and to his friendship with Mickie.

Another entertaining, engaging Le Carre novel.

This book was first published in 1996.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant satire. Hard-hitting and intelligent.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gostei muito desta sátira hilariante sobre o impotente funcionamento britânico em relação aos assuntos estrangeiros. Todo o jogo de corrupção, espionagem e mentira. E toda a informação verídica por detrás da ficção deu para aprender muita coisa e fez-me pesquisar ainda mais sobre o assunto.

[Rubi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned.

I've tried several times but... it didn't work this time. I am not interested in the story.

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up The Tailor of Panama because I had been overwhelmed and bowled-over by the awesomeness of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Half Price Books did not have a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I read TTSS on the plane from Europe, and the plot reached out to me and entangled me in its roots; I was fitfully half asleep, thinking and dreaming of the Spy - The Great Game - The Mole - KARLA! - Petrov! and that is when you know a book is good.

The Tailor of Panama was the exact opposite experience, unfortunately.

The book's protagonist? - I suppose he's a protagonist - is Harry Pendel, a sometimes tailor with a shady past. British spy Andrew Osnard comes all the way from Whitehall to Panama to personally recruit Harry Pendel to spy for the Brits in light of Panama's upcoming transition to independence. I think what I disliked the most about the book was that, given that Osnard clearly knows Pendel's a crazed liar, that he never even questions the validity of Pendel's stories. Since that's the hinge upon which the novel swings - Pendel feeding half-baked stories and lies, sometimes truths to the Brits - and it's not to be believed that Osnard never questions the material, it falls completely flat on its face. The novel has some smatterings of bright points when it delves into the inner workings of the British bureaucracy, and there were some relatively amusing lines, but that was all. John le Carré's premise of a mad tailor stitching together truth and lies into something much larger than himself was clever, but the execution and his own stitching together of this novel was poor. Neither Harry nor Andrew are particuarly interesting characters; it's the women, Louisa and Marta who actually are able to steal the show - if there was a show at all.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently watched mark Lawson's BBC4 interview with Le Carre and this book was referenced by the writer as one of his favourites. What is interesting in this book is Le Carre's ability to develop an initially comic situation within a few chapters into a story about vanity and greed. It demonstrates how a lie develops through the wishes of the intelligence service and media interests into the premise for an invasion. The story itself pitches a newly appointed spy sent to Panama , Andy Osnard, into an opportunity to build his reputation and line his pockets by blackmailing a tailor, Harry Pendel, into divulging secrets. Pendel is tailor to the president, the American army general on their base in Panama, and he knows friends who have been victim of torture by the countries brutal regime in earlier days of revolt. The twist comes in what Harry does, how Osnard reacts and consequently how Britain sees this as a new area of influence post cold war. It is a very clever book which as it progresses sees you move from the comic to a poignant reflection on intimate betrayals and the effects of powerplay. Le Carre moves from the espionage of the cold war into the politics and corruption of money, media and countries scrabbling around to maintain their position as a world player, so the story of the growing Panama crisis is prescient of crises that will come dominate the early 2000's. A brilliant writer who is more deserving of literary plaudits than some of the tosh that wins the major awards .

[Dee Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have been on a spy-thriller kick for a little while now. I wanted to read some of Le Carre's books, but they are mostly not available on the Kindle. I was in a used book store and found several of his novels cheap. I decided to "slum" it and read a real book. 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. This book was bad! There did not seem to be any order to the character development nor to the storyline. I just didn't get it. It took me over 3 weeks to plow through this one. I do NOT recommend it to anyone unless they suffer from severe insomnia, because this is the cure. It will put you to sleep every time!

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was thoroughly (and possibly unfairly) disappointed by Tailor of Panama. It's almost a bridge in subject matter between le Carre's spectacular Cold war books (the Smiley novels, etc) which he does very well, and the machinations of multinational corporations (Constant Gardener), which he also tells very well. In Tailor of Panama, le Carre describes the post-Cold War era when the Service was searching for a new purpose by messing around in third world countries, and his writing is a little messier, too.

Maybe if I had sat down to read the whole tome in one sitting it would have been better, but I lost the thread of the story in this novel like I never did in his others. The prose has a ton of section breaks, and while the Tailor himself is an exceptional character, the whole "we never know when he's lying or not" meant that *I* never knew when he was lying or not and it got a but confusing. In addition, the Tailor is constantly having flashbacks in the middle of sentences, which I found was also confusing and distracting.

Still, it's a good story, so if you want to sit and really concentrate (or if you don't mind getting pulled into confusing flashbacks), it's still a good read.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read a lovely, hilarious piece on Popula in praise of le Carré, particularly his semi-indecipherability and how that is, in fact, a feature and not a bug of his work. (Here's that link: https://popula.com/2019/02/03/like-ma...)

This one is a great look at bullshitters managing to ride the whip for as long as they can. Pendel is a world-class creation, absolutely delightful, and watching him dig himself a hole (and then learning that everyone else is also digging away, for themselves and each other) is quite compelling. The book could've been a tad shorter, without a doubt, and even if I didn't entirely understand what was going on the whole time, I still had a damn good time.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chance Favors The Prepared Mind - Pascal

Not a suspense / espionage in the regular le Carré mode, but a satire of same, and an expansive, elaborate novel at that. Since the demise of the Cold War this author has been casting around for another conflict to narrate, and I'm not sure le Carré has ever allowed himself to be this carried away by his characters and their dramatic entanglements.

That being said, there is an enormous asterisk here. The story of a bourgeois merchant-class civilian who is recruited mistakenly for espionage purposes --and sees his way clear to invent the espionage because the money is so good-- has already been covered, and really well at that. Graham Greene's Our Man In Havana did all that, and le Carré follows with a remixed version here, an homage to the original. And says so on his Acknowledgements page.

You get all the spy-novel twists : the uncomfortable domestic (family, friends, mistress) arrangements, the deceptive moves amongst the colleagues, false alibis, tails, cut-outs, dead-drops and also-- the secondary layer whereby it's all a fiction anyway. After a lifetime as the most recognized spymaster in the business, Mr. le Carré seems to have read Mr. Greene, read deeply and laughed long-- and I think he just couldn't help himself. Hints are dropped throughout that this one acknowledges it's parentage, even down to stray details like buying the pony for the daughter, mirrored exactly in the Havana original.

What makes this a uncommonly good read, then, is not only that le Carré has left off the serious hat and gone for the humorously coincidental, but that it leads him to really lively and visceral prose, not always evident in the dank corridors of the coldwar epics ...

To arrive in his little side street is for Harry Pendel a coming into harbour every time. On some days he may tease himself with the notion that the shop has vanished, been stolen, wiped out by a bomb. Or it was never there in the first place, it was one of his fantasies, something put in his imagination by his late Uncle Benny. But today his visit to the bank has unsettled him, and his eye hunts out the shop and fixes on it the moment he enters the shadow of the tall trees. You're a real house, he tells the rusty-pink Spanish roof tiles winking at him through the foliage. You're not a shop at all. You're the kind of house an orphan dreams of all his life. If only Uncle Benny could see you now.

"Notice the flower-strewn porch there," Pendel asks Benny with a nudge, "inviting you to come inside where it's nice and cool and you'll be looked after like a pasha ?"

"Harry boy, it's the maximum," Uncle Benny implies, touching the brim of his black homburg hat with both his palms at once, which was what he did when he had something cooking. "A shop like that, you can charge a pound for coming through the door."

"And the painted sign, Benny ? P&B scrolled together in a crest, which is what gives the shop its name up and down the town, whether you're in the Club Unión or the Legislative Assembly or the Palace Of Herons itself ? 'Been to P&B lately ?' 'There goes old so-and-so in his P&B suit.' That's the way they talk round here, Benny !"

"I've said it before, Harry boy, I'll say it agin. You've got the fluence. You've got the rock of eye. Who gave it you I'll always wonder..."

His courage near enough restored ... Harry Pendel mounts the steps to start his working day.

For much of the book things swirl along like this, with a kind of Walter Mitty of unintentional spies doing the narrating. Fearlessly le Carré plunges into the plot and it's cluster-verse of interconnections, making it feel both inevitable and wildly improvisatory at once.

As with many inadvisable schoolboy fancies, and even moreso those in midlife that gamble fortune and stability, things end not so well. Eventually the lighthearted and fanciful Harry Pendel is cornered, and driven to the distasteful side of spycraft, as much by realities as by creations of his own imagination, and the whole scheme goes squirrelly. (The scheme itself, called "Buchan" in the secret papers (and it's participants Buchaneers) is clearly another in the line of references le Carré is willing to entertain for humor's sake).

Interestingly, le Carré isn't done with homages, though, and invokes the enveloping desperation of Lowry's Under The Volcano, another tale of expatriate self-delusion and its discontents. The scenes of Harry walking alone through the Panamanian religious festival at the end, under hails of fireworks and under his own yoke of guilt, evoke that same conflict, cross-cultural setting intact :

Pendel was walking, and people in white were walking beside him, leading him to the gallows. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself so reconciled to death... He had never doubted that Panama had more angels per acre, more white crinolines and flowered headdresses, perfect shoulders, cooking smells, music, dancing, laughter, more drunks, malign policemen and lethal fireworks than any comparable paradise twenty times its size, and here they were assembled to escort him. And he was very gratified to discover bands playing, and competing folk dance teams, with gangly, romantic-eyed black men in cricket blazers and white shoes and flat hands that lovingly moulded the air round their partners' gyrating haunches. And to see that the double doors of the church were pulled open to give the Holy Virgin a grandstand view of the bacchanalia outside, whether She wanted it or not...
He was walking slowly, as condemned men will, keeping to the centre of the street and smiling ...

Finally, too direct to be a coincidence, that spectral Uncle Benny that keeps advising Harry from the Other Side-- is familiar too. Himself a con-man who's been responsible early in Harry's life for a few mishaps, Uncle Ben is the seasoned flim-flammer whose advice Harry cherishes in his dodgy spy endeavors. A character from another, long-ago tragedy of the merchant-class, this ghost was also named Uncle Ben, a raconteur that advised protagonist Willy Loman, in Death Of A Salesman, another ill-fated dreamer.

Not sure what le Carré was up to with all of this, and not sure he was after hooking in old lit-majors to find the references, but they are there. On a technical level this book is really brilliantly written; the structural complexity at hand is no match for Mr le Carré's craft & execution. I am knocked out by the concision, the considerable expertise at large-ensemble-cast writing.

But in the end this is a practice-piece, an excercise for le Carré. He has dressed this design in an amazing skin and cloak of colors, but the bones will always belong -- to Graham Greene.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably picked the wrong book to read as my first Le Carré spy novel, as I'm know there are many "classic" Le Carré novels that are probably more representative, but I still enjoyed this book quite a bit. I knew to expect moral complexities, of course, and a slightly jaundiced and world-weary outlook. Obviously, Le Carré is working in the tradition of Graham Greene here.

What I hadn't expected, though, was how mordantly funny Le Carré can be, not in an overt but in a subtle way. There's satirical cleverness, too, in the tale of the tailor who creates a non-existent left-wing conspiracy in order to placate his spymasters. (And who can help but think of some of the nonexistent WMD-type threats in Iraq, in retrospect, and wonder whether there were some "tailors" at work there, too?)

This book is a far cry from the sort of exotic James Bond thriller that attracts many to the genre, but for the reader who enjoys a more slowly paced tale that revolves around the complexities of human nature, this is a satisfying read.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another Le Carre novel that knocks the spots off so many others I pick up in the average year, borne by the relentless characterisations that gradually shake off the disbelief and draw you in completely to the story being told. What begins as a not very credible collection of near comic caricatures grows into some sort of reality while allowing the plot to strain at the limits of believability, anchored by the thoughts and actions of the principle protagonists. I didn’t warm to the Tailor that much, the East End boy turning ripe by the Panama Canal, nor the Bond-ish, shady spy-master, Onsard, but they glued the whole thing together and made the book what it was. Around them whirled the plot, the minor players, the Old School Ties, the inept, the innocent and the damned, dancing to a tune that sounds as if it shouldn’t hold together, but does. If I can be a bit pretentious, Le Carre writes jazz whereas so many others are penning jingles for laxative advertisements.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's just say that I'm very glad that John le Carre is a man who likes to tell stories. I will be scouring used book stores for more of his work now that I've been introduced to his witty and intelligent writing style. I prefer vintage dust jackets - I think they look great on my bookshelves. I picture le Carre as a lapels turned up sort of guy - a guy that can hail a cab with a mere wave of his hand.

Yeah, I've found a new favorite author. I loved the mix of characters, some I liked and others I despised. From cover to cover, this story delivers plenty of intrigue set against an exotic setting, which is also very convincing. I'd say that le Carre did his research. It's a bit cheeky too, which appealed to me.

[Shankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Le Carre was a recent discovery of mine while watching the TV series of The Night Manager.

While this book is of course a fiction it offers a very detailed view of Britain has grown as a political power over the centuries - by sheer weight of the ability of its diplomacy to manipulate weaker nations to its advantage and convert them into supporting Britain's global goals. My own country is an example. In this case its Panama in the story.

Andy Osnard who is the key perpetrator amongst a few others reminds of the cloyingly irritating Humphrey in Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister series.

An enjoyable book otherwise......recommended

[Clark Gudas · Rating 2 out of 5]

So long and unbelievably complex. I could follow the action reasonably well but it wasn't easy or very enjoyable. It wasn't a bad plot, just very verbose, and my lack of understanding Panamanian politics didn't help either =P

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Are you measuring me for a suit, Andy?” Slow but often brilliant. Le Carré unpacks the basic story of Graham Greene’s “Our Man In Havana”, bolts a load of realpolitik into it but fatally ditches the brevity. It is two hundred pages in before Harry Pendel actually decides to become a fully-fledged informant and while Le Carré’s prose offers many delights the glacial plotting turns this into a chore to read.

The central idea of “Havana” – ex-pat Colonialist agrees to feed morsels of intel back to London for hard cash but resorts to make-believe when the well runs dry, with predictable results – remains intact but Le Carré, when he gets there, swerves to a much darker finale than Greene’s. No romantic finales or plum job as teacher in espionage school for the Wormold stand-in here, for a writer famous for documenting the world of porky-pies Le Carré rarely strays from cold realism; he’s much more of a documentarian than a baroque fantasist. So Le Carré’s protagonist Pendel is married but adulterous, is a career fabulist, an ex-con and, natch, in financial difficulties. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find a man more likely to spout bullshit in the whole of Panama and his handler Andy Osnard really needed to stop and ask "You wouldn't be having me on, old boy, would you?" at some point, particularly since their actual first encounter hinges on him exposing Pendel as a fantasist of the first water. Pendel’s occupation as a tailor is, however, a better “in” than Wormold’s role as vacuum-cleaner salesman although what you gain in realism you lose in English whimsy. Le Carré is also good on the subtle class prejudices going on between the two Englishmen – the two men privately unpacking each other’s accents over the phone – and digs deeper into Pendel’s psychological make-up than Greene did with Wormold although he pivots between the banal – Pendel has Irish ancestry so he has the gift of the gab – to the more insightful, as here:

“It was a system of survival that Pendel had developed in prison and perfected in marriage, and its purpose was to provide a hostile world with whatever made it feel at ease with itself. To make it tolerable. To befriend it. To draw its sting.”

However, plot in “Panama” is screamingly not its raison d’etre. This novel is an excuse for a fin de siecle tour d’horizon which Le Carré delivers in spades. Dave has been to Panama and he wants you to know all about it so there is much toothsome reportage on the state of the world in 1996, the role of the Panama Canal and its impact on global trade and the like. Less charitable reviewers might suggest this is akin to being stuck in the back of an Uber with a particularly gobby driver going via Aberdeen to your destination two roads away but outside of the Smiley sequence a “State Of The Nation” is kind of what you want from the latest Le Carré. When you pony up for one of his novels you’re buying a well-spoken, left-leaning novelist telling you, in rather good prose, how the world is and how you should think:

“God, how he loathed this government. Little England, PLC. Directed by a team of lying tenth-raters not fit to run an amusement arcade in Clacton-on-Sea. Conservatives who would strip the country of its last lightbulb to conserve their power. Who thought the Civil Service a luxury as expendable as world survival or the nation’s health, and the Foreign Service the most expendable luxury of the lot.”

Is this Nigel Stormont, ex-pat civil servant speaking or the novelist? Since it chimes with my own politics I’m obviously on my feet applauding while noting you don’t tend to get many right-wingers sounding off in a Le Carré novel. It would have been an interesting twist for Stomont to think exactly the opposite of the above but Mr Le Carré loves his mouthpieces, his characters set up to do pretty much what you’d expect them to do, his elegant, curlicued sentences and sub-clauses which are about as far from Greene’s streamlined prose as you can get. Don’t get me wrong, this novel contains superb writing, politics I agree with, and comedians have long since moved on from criticising Le Carré for his Le Carré-ness but “Panama” was still a relief to finish, it stayed resolutely in first gear throughout and Le Carré as homme sérieux had to work hard to make the whimsical conceit of a very different author work inside of his documentary take on global millenial politics. “The rest fluence”.

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite an enjoyable reading, even though spying and international intrigue is not among my favourite genres. But I had this book lying around for too long and decided I had to read it before letting it go again through Bookcrossing, which is where it came from. One of the things I found very interesting is how the core of the story of The Tailor of Panama remains so up-to-date: intelligence services from developed countries looking for new purposes by messing around in the third world, a small lie becoming bigger and bigger until it is appropriated by those services/governments and the media as a means to justify a military invasion... I had the notion I already knew this story, and it was not from the movies, but from the news instead...

[Kiki Bolwijn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wel knap hoe je zó racistisch en vrouw-onvriendelijk kan schrijven met ook zo ontzettend veel toxic masculinity in de kern. Hoe past het allemaal in één boek? Een les in vreselijkheid.

(geluisterd voor Storytel)

[Noo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could be one of the most boring books I've ever attempted to get in to. I used to be pigheadedly determined to finish the books I'd started, but after trawling through 9 books of The Wheel of Time, I realised that life is too short to read bad fiction.

Anyway, 100 pages in and NOTHING HAPPENED. And I cared not for the characters that nothing was happening to, so I'm out.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tailor living in Panama reluctantly becomes a spy for a British Agent.

A movie was made based on this book, with Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, Jamie Lee Curtis.

[Colin Versteeg · Rating 3 out of 5]

not his best work

[Sportyrod · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my second Panama Canal book and hopefully not the last.

This tailor spun a yarn convincing enough to fool just about anybody. That was until Andrew Osnard waltzed into his life…

The book is all about espionage and geopolitics in the lead up to the relinquishing of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. I enjoyed patches of hundred pages, but struggled between them. I really liked the innocent ol’ tailor beginning and how he did his work. I was caught offguard by some of the early plot twists.

It lost steam during the highly detailed build up although the writing itself was quite good. The man’s world characters didn’t appeal to me, and since I procrastinated during slow parts, it was sometimes confusing to remember which douchebag was which. Most main male characters had females in their lives who doted on them, allowing them to sleep around and be ready for them when they finally got home. One of them made a charge for power but had to do so by having an unhinged neurotic outburst. So the cliché gender roles for this era didn’t do a lot for me, although I couldn’t help but soak up every part of that outburst.

I was not satisfied with the ending. It felt like when someone is about to lose a board game and they tip the board over. You spend so much time investing in it and that happens.

2.5 rounded down. There was brilliance, but there was dreariness.

[Dylan Dusseault · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whomst among us hasn’t gotten a little to caught up in a lie trying to look cool to a new friend amirite?

[Ryan Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sometimes overlooked le Carre stunner is a searingly good espionage story that uses location and geopolitical timing as characters.

We are in post-Noreiga, pre-Canal coming back into Panama’s hands, Panama, so an area crucial to of the late 90’s global zeitgeist. The backstory of our main characters, two bullshit artists in a high-stakes chess match, layer into the plot perfectly. As the quickly moving events soak us in sweat, the stakes are raised each time some element of the past is revealed.

You can feel le Carre having fun crafting this plot. He fills it to its bursting point like a balloon on verge of explosion, and once there cranks up the force of the water further. Much of the le Carre we love is quiet and dour, but The Tailor of Panama has all the subtlety of a scream in church. His range as a writer is magnificent.

Highly recommended to fans of espionage, le Carre, or anyone intrigued by Central American spycraft.