The Night Manager. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 18, 1993 by Craig S. Lerner

The Night Manager, by John le Carre (Knopf, 429 pp., $24)

EVIL no longer stalks the dark corridors of the Lubyanka. In John le Carre's new novel, "the worst man in the world" is an English-man named Dicky Roper who wears Gucci espadrilles and Caribbean whites. He is at the center of a worldwide arms-for-drugs conspiracy of the approximate plausibility of an Oliver Stone movie. Jonathan Pine, night manager of a posh Zurich hotel, offers to insinuate himself into Roper's retinue on behalf of MI-6. His final conquest is Roper's mistress, Jed, whose transformation from footloose houri to love-pious accomplice to the saintly Pine is the height of improbabilities. But who said fiction is real life? The Night Manager is great fun. Throwaway characters are lovingly described with Proustian excess. Le Carre notes of a small girl, "With her long fair hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child of the French aristocracy on her way to the scaffold." The innocent are seldom spared in the thrillingly sinister world of John le Carre.