For fans of John le Carré

At the end of The Night Manager, John le Carré discusses plot and character differences that were used in the 2015 TV adaptation of his book. Let me say, up front, that I preferred the screen version.

The story is set in the early 1990s and opens with the eponymous night manager, Jonathan Pine, waiting for hotel guests to arrive. He's thinking about the death a few years earlier, of Sophie, a woman he slept with and who was killed, probably on the orders of "the worst man in the world", Richard Onslow Roper. Pine blames himself, as well as Roper, for Sophie's death, and it is Roper and his party who are expected at the hotel.

Roper and Pine are perhaps two faces of the same coin. The baddie is a man in whose past "there was neither striving nor disadvantage. Class, privilege .... had been handed to Roper on a salver". In contrast, Pine was orphaned from an early age, and "When God finished putting together Dicky Roper .... He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance". However, I found Pine to be rather wooden and couldn't believe that so many women fell in love with him on sight. Perhaps this is just a feature of the early '90s setting, but none of the female characters exist other than to provide sex, and they are of course long-legged, slim, beautiful and of questionable intelligence. I never really cared about our hero and his mission, and preferred the uneasy, unpredictable company of Roper and his gang.

Another problem was the writing style. There were several instances where, for no reason I could discern, the tense shifted from past to present and back again several times.

The best bits of the book were the manoeuvres of the "espiocrats" in London and America following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Le Carré provides insight into the changes that were taking place within the British intelligence industry, the potential obsolescence of the old style Cold War spy. The story also touches on the hypocrisy of Governments as when Roper talks about cocaine: "Not only does Uncle Sam choose to poison himself with it, but he enriches the oppressed Latinos while he's about it!" And as for the illegal arms trade, the real enemies are the big power governments, "flogging anything to anybody, breaking their own rules". However this is not really a theme of the book.

Aficionados of John Le Carré will probably enjoy The Night Manager much more than I did.

More Stuff
The trailer for the BBC television adaptation of The Night Manager: