Absolute Friends

*Absolute Friends* is a novel written by John le Carré. Published in 2003, it tells the extraordinary life story of Ted Mundy.

## Characters

* Ted Mundy
* Sasha
* Dmitri
* The Major
* Kate Mundy
* Zara
* Jay O'Rourke
* Mustafa

## Synopsis

Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict.

After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life-this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could.

In *Absolute Friends*, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

## Plot

The book tells the story of Ted Mundy, the Pakistan-born son of a British army officer, who as a student becomes proficient in the German language. He joins a 1960s-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 Berlin 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.

In Bavaria, Ted Mundy wears a bowler hat and stands on a soapbox for his work as a tour guide. The hat is not Mundy's but rather - as Mundy puts it - a "hat of office" and a "gem of history". During his speech on the hat, Mundy makes a reference to Neville Chamberlain's pact with the devil. He then begins a speech on the Munich Agreement of 1938 motivated by the British fear of Bolshevism ("All *any of 'em* wanted was to turn Hitler loose on the Red Peril."). Mundy ends his speech by tipping his bowler hat.

Eventually Mundy obtains a position with the British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha has defected to East Germany to become a member of the notorious Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre group, Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the Communist Bloc and enlists the naïve 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. After the wall comes down, Sasha asks Mundy to continue engaging in geopolitics with him, but Mundy- whose marriage has collapsed as a result of his secret life- refuses, and the two part ways. In the ensuing decade, Mundy moves to Germany and becomes a tour guide at Neuschwanstein Castle, begins dating a Turkish refugee, and considers converting to Islam to marry her and help raise her son.

Following 9/11, Sasha resurfaces to tell Mundy that he's become involved in an organization to combat American military and industrial globalization. Fearing that Sasha has been radicalized, Mundy is relieved to discover that he in fact wants Mundy to help him set up a Socialist think-tank that will be financed by a Russian oligarch with left-leaning sympathies. Initially excited to participate, Mundy becomes skeptical when he learns that he and Sasha's former CIA contact is somehow involved in the scheme. Going to the schoolhouse one night, Mundy realizes too late that the boxes of books he and Sasha have been receiving in fact contain bomb-making materials and military grade weaponry; he and an arriving Sasha are both shot to death by a waiting American strike force.

After their deaths, Sasha's past with the Stasi and Mundy's Islamic sympathies are used by the CIA and right-leaning American press outlets to portray them as terrorists "with connections to Al-Qaeda", in efforts to convince the German government to support the United States in its War on Terror. After Mundy's death, Amory, his controller from the British intelligence service during his espionage years, tries to publicize the truth, but slander by the British government results in his story being totally discredited. Mundy's girlfriend and her son are deported, and Germany enters the War on Terror; per their wills, Mundy and Sasha are each buried beside their mothers in their respective home countries.

## Sources

* Absolute Friends on Wikipedia
* Absolute Friends on Goodreads