Books like The Naive and Sentimental Lover

An excellent book. Le Carré fans will be nonplussed when they read this, there isn't a spy or a civil servant on the horizon. It's the author's only departure from the genre that he has made his own, and in his own words it "isn't everyone's cup of tea, to say the least". In fact there is hardly any plot: the book deals with an encounter between an eccentric writer, his girlfriend and a businessman going through a midlife crisis. But the prose is superb: the story is told through a series of subjective implications, hints, and half-facts, which show Le Carré's descriptive skills at their finest. As such it is reminiscent of The Honourable Schoolboy, but here he gives free rein to his mastery of the English language. After the book was discredited by reviewers, he seems to have abandoned any attempt to indulge in writing prose for prose's sake, which in my view has made some of his later novels rather formulaic.