Le Carré novels are quite often adapted for the big screen. His older novels, circa Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy were novels first and became movies later. Chapters were 30+ pages with meaty paragraphs of description. The Honourable SchoolBoy was considered a good book but was passed up for the big screen because it considered unfilmable. It makes me wonder if the author, with all his success at screen adapations, could avoid having the fact that his novel might become adapted to the screen effect the craft of his prose.
Our Kind of Traitor is Le Carré’s twenty second novel and it felt like a victim of this success. It feels more like a novel that was written with the intention of being a movie. At least that was my first impression of the novel. I was not a fan of the first 200 pages which were cuts between an interrogation and past events. I wrongly assumed that it was written this way so that it could be adapted for the screen in the same manner. So, I found the first 200 pages jarring and longed for the meaty dense prose paragraphs of the past. Once, the scenery was set though, I did find the novel flew by.
This novel was adapted into a movie by Canal+, it’s currently free on Tubi if you want to watch it. Have I told you how much I love Tubi? And wasn’t I surprised to watch it and see how much the narrative structure was different. A chronological narrative instead of a bifurcated interrogation. So my theory that the book was written for the screen was really moot.
This book is classified as a thriller but I didn’t find it that thrilling. The only part that gave a real punch was the end of the novel.