My heart wasn’t really in this post. A
Delicate Truth was the tail end of my holiday reading in Australia, not however
completed until well after being thrown back into the frenzy of the rentrée. It
duly got finished bittily, rather than in the quick but substantial bursts
appropriate to a book like this. Moreover, all this was a while ago, meaning
the novel has faded rather from my memory.
Was it a bad book? Actually not at all,
with some critics describing it as something of a return to form for Le Carré.
I was unaware that he was particularly out of form, except inasmuch as his Cold
War glory days (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy) are growing ever more distant, though the Constant Gardener was of course
a bit of a hit more recently. Over time, I have dipped into Le Carré’s recent
novels mainly for lightish relief, often in the form of audio books on long
journeys (always read by the author himself, a job he does very well, by the
way).
Such was the spirit in which I undertook
this book, boosted by a couple of positive reviews in Sunday newspapers.
