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.
"...without Graham Greene this book would never have come about. After Greene's 'Our Man in Havana', the notion of an intelligence fabricator would not leave me alone".It was probably not a good idea to read this book so soon after the Graham Greene novel on which Le Carre drew his inspiration. The two stories share a similar conceit and narrative arc, and Le Carre's modern (in 1996) take on Greene's 1958 original is just as cynical in its view of Western foreign policy and British interference in small countries with distant shores.On reflection, however, these books are for very different times. Greene was writing in a far more innocent era, before the full grip of the Cold War had taken hold. He applies a cutting humour that lampoons the British intelligence service and deflates its importance. Le Carre's view is necessarily darker and bleaker. His protagonist Harry Pendel descends from his position of apparent gentility into his own personal hell as he betrays everyone with whom he comes into contact. Here British intelligence and the government it works for act without any accountability or morality, using whatever means they consider necessary to pursue their self-interest with total disregard for the cost in human lives. Both authors show remarkable prescience in their accounts of how fallible our intelligence services are - both stories play on how the informants give their paymasters exactly the information they want to hear, however inaccurate or fanciful, and this situation serves the interests of all concerned, initially at least. They foretell the role of faked intelligence that Bush and Blair used as their "peg" to justify the 2003 bombardment and invasion of Iraq, a true story that could have come straight out of Le Carre. I am puzzled by other readers' comments on struggling to grasp what was happening in this novel. I accept that Le Carre lets events unfold gradually with subtle suggestions as to what Pendel is up to as he reports to his spymaster. Perhaps my familiarity with Greene's story helped me here, for the shadow of 'Our Man in Havana' followed me throughout. Nevertheless I think this is one of Le Carre's more straightforward books to read, without the labyrinthine plots and complex narrative structures in many of his other works. I do not rate it as highly as the other Le Carre novels I have read - 'The spy who came in from the cold', 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy', 'The constant gardener', 'A most wanted man' - but it is an enjoyable, gripping read. I particularly loved its final chapters, especially the one in which Pendel takes a long drive through the night with his strange, silent companion to the Indian encampment, as though re-enacting a scene from a Sam Peckinpah film such as 'Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia'. This is Le Carre at his bleak, mordant best.
What do You think about The Tailor Of Panama (1996)?
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.
—Jim
I'll let you in on a secret: this book doesn't belong to me.It sits there on my shelf, but it is not my own. And I don't intend to give it back either.Yes, that's right, I'm a book thief. (though, legally, I suppose I could argue that a) it's not theft because it was in fact given to me, and b) the giver's behaviour leads to the conclusion that he wanted me to keep it).The reason I'm keeping this book is not because it is such a good book. I don't really know if it is good or not, I never really read it. I watched the movie with Pierce Brosnan (which is okay, but mostly because staring at Pierce Brosnan for two hours is rarely a waste of time), and then I kind of skipped through the book to see if there was anything in there worth reading that wasn't in the movie. I don't think there was. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of details that the movie doesn't mention, but the overall story, the suspense that the book is build on (and I have no doubts that there's tons of suspense), kind of dwindles when you've already seen the movie). Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.No, I'm keeping this book just because it was given to me by my ex, and everytime I look at it, I think about him. Which was a pain in the ass in the beginning, because I loved him very much, but is a wonderful reminder of one of the better relationships I've had in my life today. And sometimes, when I look at the book and think about him, I call him to see how he is doing, and it makes me happy and grateful for having loved him and being able to call him a friend to this day.(there, that was you daily dosis of sentimentality. You can now return to your normal business.)
—Oceana2602
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.
—Diana Cahill
