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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
I didn't get the feeling that Toby and Emily were going to end up dead. In describing the time leading up to Toby's beating, le Carré says:
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... though he could never be sure, he never saw or afterwards found it, and only remembered it, if at all, by its gluey smell - ...
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in reference to a piece of sacking being put over his head. That doesn't suggest to me that he was about to be gunned down by whoever was coming for him with sirens wailing. The final sentence certainly suggests that several organisations might be coming for him at once.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic in thinking that Toby and Emily would survive. But the fact that le Carré doesn't end with a pile of corpses at least leaves the possibility that the decent man might live to fight another day. |
I'm going to be working my way backwards, I see, but I thought I'd respond to this first.
I thought this quite clever of le Carré, as the structure made either outcome plausible. When I initially read this and other comments, I thought it meant Toby survived. But as the story played out, I realized that they all could have referred to the time in between his beating and when the sirens came. A
The Lady or the Tiger? ending, or possibly
The Sopranos, to be a little more current, and very effective, for me, as it pulled me up short; there's that tendency to think that the good guys are going to win.