OUR GAME

[Editor's Note: The following is a combined review with the Chivers production of OUR GAME.]--The narrators of John le Carré's novels are famous in the audiobook world for their hard-edged intensity and accurate renditions of the dialects and accents of varied classes, as well as German, Polish, Russian, and American characters. Tim Cramner and Larry Pettifer, double agents and childhood chums, have been left with unfulfilled agendas at the end of the Cold War: Tim's is to live in elegant, self-satisfied retirement with his young lover, Emma, and Larry's is to find a better cause worth dying for. Their mutual quests for self-identity comprise the heart of this artful psychological thriller. Franklyn-Robbins has the literary and vocal talent to make this complex novel of voices work as performance literature. He emphasizes Cramner's retrospective impatience and contempt for his own blindness in not seeing soon enough the obvious truths of his life. He also knows to soften him with an underlying self-forgiveness. engaging the temper of the book appropriately with a slower pace and welcome pauses at crucial scene changes and chapter endings. P.W. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT 97]