“The Tailor of Panama” by John le Carré

Sigh. I finished reading this book a week and a half ago and have dragged my feet about it ever since then. Each day that passes solidifies my impression: this was just not my kind of book. The bad thing is, it's the only John le Carré book I've ever read. I'm torn between wondering if I won't like any of his books, and wondering if I shouldn't even bother trying to find out. 

We recently re-organized all the books in our house, and now all my TBRs are together (all 384 of them). This makes it both easier and more difficult to choose my next read. All my choices are in one spot, but . . . oof, there are so many choices. (Once I get through my current stack-in-progress, I am definitely going back to my old system, because it was awesome: choose 4 books, and read them in order from the one that interests me the least to the one that interests me the most.)

We took a trip last month, and 1) I brought the right amount of books based on previous trips (one for every two days), but 2) for some reason we did very little reading on this trip and 3) I brought two books I wasn't super-excited about reading, and this was one of them. (Now that I think about it, #3 probably had an impact on #2.) Good thing we had a long flight, because I was able to force my way through this one on the way home. It was hard for me to get into, but then it started to get kinda good . . . which lasted for about twenty pages before it dropped back down into meh territory. What's more, I couldn't grasp the tone. I read it as tongue-in-cheek and darkly humorous, but it got pretty serious towards the end. Did I misread the whole thing?

OK, so everyone knows le Carré does spy novels, right? Intrigue, suspense, backstabbing--seems like something I could get into. And the premise of this one isn't bad: there's a tailor in Panama (would you ever have guessed?) who dresses all the rich people, making him fairly well-connected. He's a British expat, so when a guy, from, like, MI6 or whatever shows up looking for a new spy, he figures the tailor is his man. Especially because he knows the tailor is living a lie to hide the embarrassing details of his past. This is good for two reasons: the tailor obviously knows how to keep a secret, but also the spy-recruiter knows the tailor will probably do anything to keep his secret past a secret. BUT what the spy guy doesn't know is that the tailor just Makes Up a Bunch of Stuff ALL the time. So when New Spy is feeding information to Old Spy . . . most of it is a crock. I don't know, it was just all over the place, kind of like this blog post. I'm just gonna hit publish before this gets any worse. 

Oh . . . is THAT what happened to this book??