Wood on Le Carré.
James Wood, who is probably my favourite literary critic, writes about the work of John Le Carré, and in particular his new novel Absolute Friends, in the latest issue of The New Republic. Wood places Le Carré in a no-man's land between literary and genre fiction. He is not in the same league as other, more literary, writers who have dealt with espionage (Greene, Conrad), but his writing is a cut above "the bald-faced illiteracies of a contemporary thriller writer". It is for this reason that Wood says that critics have been soft on Le Carré: he is better than your average blockbuster writer, but still short of qualifying as a literary artist. Le Carré is a guilty pleasure of the literary elite. He tells good stories, and he tells them well. As Wood writes, "it is the discourse of an educated man rather than the words-by-the-yard offered by contemporary sellers. But it is, all the same, genre-writing." Wood acknowledges that Le Carré is darker, more complicated antidote to the flashiness of Fleming, but Wood reminds us that while Le Carré may be the best of them, at essence he will always be a thriller writer.