Word: ned
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...Weld is brazen, then Weicker and Tennessee's Ned McWherter, who is also trying to institute a state income tax, may be courting political folly. The only time a state income tax was enacted in Connecticut, in 1971, it provoked such an outcry that it was repealed within six weeks. Tennesseans dislike the tax so much that the state courts once declared it unconstitutional. Both Governors hope to soften the blow of the new levies by lowering sales taxes. McWherter, a Democrat re-elected last fall, has also made the plan more palatable by promising to channel the new revenue...
Attentive John le Carre fans may recognize the narrator of the author's 13th novel. He is Ned (no last name given), the British intelligence official who ran the operation so vividly bungled in the best-selling The Russia House (1989). That fiasco was not Ned's fault, to be sure, but he has been punished by his Service superiors anyhow, unplugged from the power loop and farmed out to teach spycraft to young recruits. On an inspired whim, Ned manages to lure his old mentor, George Smiley, out of retirement to spend an evening talking with these students...
...that arc of Ned's memory is essentially the plot of The Secret Pilgrim. The novel has no grand, tantalizing design; the individual adventures that Ned remembers are chiefly connected by the fact that he took some part in them. Readers familiar with Le Carre's multi-volume fictional saga of postwar British intelligence will see in Ned's recollections a series of outtakes from a story that has already been told...
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided the new material is interesting. Most of Ned's additions are. Several are funny, including Ned's attempts as a Service neophyte to tail and protect an oil-rich sheik and his shoplifting wife on spending binges across London's West End. There are tales of betrayal, accidental and cold-blooded. And there is some rough stuff. Ned remembers a beating he had suffered at the hands of a Polish military officer who then, rolling down his sleeves, offered his services as a double agent for the British. Another episode seems...
...reappearance of George Smiley, who has not been seen in Le Carre's fiction since Smiley's People (1980). In what is basically a walk-on or, in this case, a sit-down role, Smiley retains his enigmatic, nondescript power. At the after-dinner session, introduced by Ned as a "legend of the Service," Smiley tells the expectant students, "Oh, I don't think I'm a legend at all. I think I'm just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port." Not true. Ned paraphrases the remarks of an extremely clever and thoughtful...