pamela
I often try to get into le Carré, but find myself getting bored, so I must admit I am definitely not the target audience for The Night Manager, but as a book club pick, I was obliged to read it.
To start off, I was definitely enticed by the quality of le Carré's writing. The open scenes of hotel politics and funny anecdotes about guests almost won me over. But ultimately, The Night Manager is overwritten, outdated, and just not that interesting. It felt like a historical artefact (which is how I had to approach it some of the time just to deal with the way that le Carré writes his women) - an object of the 90s that even then harked back to a post-Cold War era style that appeals mainly to Boomers and men who view women as nothing more than objects of desire.
The plot took almost 200 pages to get going, and then once it was over, it felt like le Carré got bored and just wrapped everything up as quickly as possible, plot threads be damned. It meant the whole book felt wholly unsatisfying. There were some interesting moments of characterisation (for the men), but it wasn't enough to keep me interested.
The Night Manager gets three stars for the quality of the writing alone, but I definitely didn't have fun with it.