Absolute Friends

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Absolute Friends is an espionage novel by John le Carré published in December 2003.

1 Plot introduction
2 Plot summary
3 Characters in "Absolute Friends"
4 External links

[edit] Plot introduction

The book tells the story of Ted Mundy, a Pakistani born Briton who as a student becomes proficient in the German language.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Mundy joins a 1960's era student protest group in West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a West German student anarchist named Sasha. Having been brutally beaten by West Belin police and ejected from Germany, Mundy fails at several careers, as a teacher at an English prep school, as a newspaper reporter, a radio interviewer and a novelist. Eventually Mundy obtains a position with the British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha defected to East Germany and became a member of the notorious GDR Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theater group Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the Communist Bloc and enlists the naive Mundy to become a double agent. Sasha has access to state secrets and he recruits Mundy to help him smuggle them out of East Germany and deliver them to MI6, the British Secret Service. Their efforts contribute to the collapse of the GDR and eventual destruction of the Berlin Wall.

The novel ends in tragedy when Sasha and Mundy once again conspire with grandiose schemes to combat American military and industrial globalization. In the end the two ideologues end up the pawns of the group they thought they were combating, are killed and portrayed as terrorists "with connections to Al-Qaeda" in an attempt to convince European governments to support the United States in its war on terror.

After Mundy's tragic end, Amory, his controller from the British intelligence service during his espionage years tries to publicize the truth about Mundy, but is slandered by the British government to the extent his story is totally discredited