Peter Elfed Lewis

It wasn't until I got to "The Night Manager" that I started to like Le Carre. I read "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" later in my Le Carre binge because it was hard to find before I got on to the idea of searching the net through Alibris and ABE Books -that I liked a lot. Maybe I had a problem with the spying thing but I think it was probably that those books all seemed to end with the death of a character I was being to appreciate. I am a bit of a Pollyanna in that I like life and my story books to be happy ones. Anyway, in this little book, Mr Lewis has awakened a different appreciation in me of the early Le Carre books. I have enjoyed reading his explanations, assessments and critiques of each of the first nine "spy" novels. There was a brief reference to "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" and I was disappointed by that omission but, in all, It is a good book to library alongside the novels themselves.… (meer)