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The Night Manager

John le carré.

597 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1993

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‘Not bad chaps, Rex. Mustn't be too critical. Just a bit marooned. No more Thatcher. No more Russian bear to fight, no more Reds under the bed at home. One day they've got the world all carved up for them, two legs good, four bad. Next day they get up in the morning, they're sort of – well – you know—’ He finished his premise with a shrug. ‘Well, nobody likes a vacuum, do they? Not even you like a vacuum. Well, do you? Be honest. You hate it.’ ‘By vacuum, you mean peace?’ Goodhew suggested, not wishing in the least to sound censorious.

American veterans sickened first by war and then by peace; Russian Spetsnaz, trained to guard a country that disappeared while their backs were turned; Frenchmen who still hated de Gaulle for giving away North Africa; the Israeli boy who had known nothing but war, and the Swiss boy who had known nothing but peace; the Englishmen in search of military nobility because their generation somehow missed the fun (if only we could have had a British Vietnam!), the huddle of introspective Germans torn between the guilt of war and its allure.

❝ Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life.❞

❝ When we had bows and arrows we were apes with bows and arrows. Now we're apes with multiple warheads.❞

❝ The only crime she had omitted to mention was the theft of her own heart.❞

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THE NIGHT MANAGER

by John le Carré ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 1993

Le Carre returns to the same subject as his disappointingly episodic The Secret Pilgrim—the fate of espionage in the new world order—but now looks forward instead of backward, showing a not-quite innocent mangled between that new order and the old one, whose course le Carre has so peerlessly chronicled for 30 years. Jonathan Pine, night manager at a Cairo hotel, helps Arab playboy Freddie Hamid's mistress Madame Sophie photocopy papers linking him to arms mogul Richard Roper and, while he's at it, makes an extra copy to send to a friend in the Secret Service—only to find that the leak has gotten back to Freddie and that Jonathan's belated, guilty devotion to Sophie can't protect her from a fatal beating. Six months later, Jonathan, now working in Geneva, meets Roper in person and, vowing revenge, volunteers for Leonard Burr's fledgling government agency as the inside man who can supply actionable details of Roper's next arms- for-drugs deal. With the help of Whitehall mandarin Rex Goodhew, Burr sets up a plausibly shady dossier for Jonathan and stages the kidnapping of Roper's son so that Jonathan can foil the snatch and get invited aboard Roper's yacht. But even as Jonathan, still grieving for Sophie, finds himself attracted to Roper's bedmate Jed Marshall and overriding Burr's orders to stay out of Roper's papers, the boys in Whitehall—divided between independents like Goodhew, who want the old agencies broken up, and his cold-warrior nemesis Geoffrey Darker, who insists on maintaining centralized authority—are squabbling over control of the mission, with dire results for Jonathan, whose most dangerous enemies turn out to be his well-meaning masters back home. Despite the familiarity of the story's outlines, le Carre shows his customary mastery in the details—from Jonathan's self-lacerating momentum to the intricacies of interagency turf wars—and reveals once again why nobody writes espionage fiction with his kind of authority.

Pub Date: July 7, 1993

ISBN: 0345385764

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | ESPIONAGE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by John le Carré ; edited by Tim Cornwell ; illustrated by John le Carré

by John le Carré

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

More by Lisa Jewell

by Lisa Jewell

DARK MATTER

by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016

Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.

A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.

Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.

Pub Date: July 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION | THRILLER | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER

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by Blake Crouch

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How plausible is John le Carré’s The Night Manager?

The Sunday night adaptation of Le Carré’s arms-trading spy thriller is a TV sensation – but how far does it blur the lines between fact and fiction?

E ver since the collapse of the Soviet Union, John le Carré has been looking for targets beyond the murky, mutual, spying of the cold war. He has directed his genuine and growing anger at more topical, straightforward, targets: a large pharmaceutical company (The Constant Gardener), extraordinary rendition (A Most Wanted Man), and Foreign Office/MI6 involvement in the work of private US military contractors (A Delicate Truth).

Twice in his later books, Le Carré (born David Cornwell) has acknowledged help from the human-rights charity Reprieve. He is no friend of MI6, nor of MI5, despite their attempts to forgive their former officer.

His constant themes are corruption, money-laundering, rule-breaking and the moral equivalence between those supposedly on “our side” and the enemy. The Night Manager, the much-discussed adaptation now being shown on BBC1 on Sunday nights, is no exception. The question is how plausible it all is.

Here are some guidelines. A very senior MI6 officer told the Chilcot inquiry that he and his colleagues were concerned about the UK joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, “not because we aimed to do something we knew was illegal, though, of course, by definition, all MI6 activity was illegal, but because we didn’t want to put our feet in the wrong place or get snagged.”

The Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry heard that soon after Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in 1988, a senior Foreign Office official wrote: “It could look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage over the Iraqi treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.”

Whitehall did adopt a more flexible approach, but kept it quiet. MI6 was directly involved, with the CIA, in the abduction of two prominent Libyan dissidents subsequently tortured by Gaddafi’s secret police. Phoney companies are par for the course.

So, The Night Manager may be surprisingly plausible, as brutal and deeply cynical elements in MI6 and the CIA protect Richard Roper’s illegal arms-dealing and shell companies. Ministry of Defence officials have been known to accept bribes .

Jonathan Pine’s infiltration of Roper’s outfit could certainly pass the plausibility test. Least plausible is Angela Burr. A former top MI6 officer would not get away with setting up a separate anti-arms-trader unit with links to the CIA. And would Roper’s contempt for Corky, his erstwhile front man, really blind him into trusting Pine so much, for so long?

There are chauffeur-driven Mercedes rather than Aston Martins, and the villains – Roper and his friends – are archetypal Englishmen. There were some classic Le Carré lines in Sunday’s, penultimate, episode: “Anyone can betray anyone,” then, later, “the whole system keeps the country where we want it ... we made Richard Roper”.

Yet Pine, helped by Roper’s girlfriend, Jed, is bringing Le Carré and Ian Fleming closer together, however much the incomparable inventor of George Smiley might not like it. No wonder Tom Hiddleston is hot favourite to be the new 007.

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'The Night Manager': EW review

Senior Writer

Jonathan Pine is a former British soldier looking to escape the chaos and crookedness of our times. Yet quagmire chases him, and he can’t resist falling into it. While working the graveyard shift at a Cairo hotel during the Arab Spring, Sophie (Aure Atika), an equally worldweary woman sultry with danger, begs a favor that arouses his conscience, and other parts of him, too. The consequences draw Pine (Tom Hiddleston) into a twilight realm and suck us deep into The Night Manager , an ironic and engrossing saga about dark-knight heroism that continues an extraordinary year for smartly written, acting-driven short-form serials (see: American Crime ; The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story ).

The novel The Night Manager , written by British spy-fi master John le Carré in 1993, engaged the new reality of post–Cold War geopolitics and reflected a genre in transition. The miniseries updates the premise and speaks to a moment dull and dim with antiheroes. After the aforementioned Egyptian business leads to tragedy, Pine runs away again, taking post at a remote mountain resort. But a call to do-gooding—and opportunity for score-settling—finds him anew one evening when bogeyman arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) arrives with Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), his pale and beautiful girlfriend, and Corky (Tom Hollander), his foul, suspicious chief of staff. Duty and vendetta needle Pine to risk tattling on them. A British intelligence officer named Burr (Olivia Colman) prods him to take it further. Soon, Pine has masked himself with a false identity—a rogue named Andrew Birch—and infiltrated Roper’s family-tight operation in Palma de Mallorca, an island paradise full of temptations. Can Pine rope Roper without getting exposed or scorched by so much evil under the sun? Such is the screw-tightening suspense, impressively directed by Danish helmer Susanne Bier.

The Night Manager comes on like film noir, the kind where a flawed Everyman in a fallen world is seduced by desperate femmes fatales and a mesmerizing villain. But the warm, classical visual aesthetic is your first sign that this show has limited interest in affirming the cynicism of the genre or the current pop zeitgeist. Hiddleston’s deceptively passive Pine is a decidedly different take on the cool, privately tortured undercover operative at risk of losing himself in the murk of his work. Burr’s decency and patriotism (and her pregnancy) recall Frances McDormand’s Marge from Fargo . Sophie and Jed aren’t tempter vixens. Like Pine, they’re trapped souls who desire full, righteous lives—not hollow, sell-out lives.

Laurie’s Roper is the slyest creation. He’s an anti-Bond villain to Pine’s anti-Bond hero. He captivates us not with pure evil but with the possibility that he might only be a slimy international businessman, one with sincere romantic, philanthropic, and fatherly dimensions. Watching this death merchant delight in producing violent spectacle, collecting youth and beauty and grooming Pine to be the new “star” of his sick show, you wonder if Laurie is playing an arms dealer or a movie producer. A clever fable of heroic renewal, The Night Manager gives us a redemptive journey into a heart of darkness and a portrait of a genre mired in shadow pining for daylight. A–

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Brief Encounters

By Emily Nussbaum

There’s a lot to be said for the six-episode cable drama. If it doesn’t work, no great loss—that’s only two nights wasted, not several years. It’s a welcome gift in an era when too many shows arrive with the scary caveat “The fifth episode is when things get good!”

Brevity is one advantage of AMC’s “The Night Manager,” an elegant but ultimately empty John le Carré adaptation, starring Hugh Laurie. Based on le Carré’s 1993 spy novel of the same name, “The Night Manager” has been updated, from the Colombian drug wars to the Arab Spring. But there’s little here that’s new under the Egyptian sun. The story concerns a repressed, beautiful, tormented but decent hotel manager in Cairo named Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), who gets recruited to infiltrate a criminal cartel. The first episode features overwrought sequences of doomed love, as the camera peeks showily through spiral bannisters; the second is when things get good. But even then the appeal is pure mood: in this high-end universe, everything feels at once corrupt, delectable, and melancholy, with that quality of “world-weariness” which serves as an aesthetic simulacrum of sophistication. The show is what many American viewers consider adult drama—it’s British and expensive-looking and involves movie stars, among other things—but it’s just an old recipe made with artisanal ingredients. If you’ve been watching the FX series “The Americans,” a far riskier, more wrenching examination of similar themes, it’s hard to take “The Night Manager” seriously.

Still, Hugh Laurie has a wonderful time grimacing nihilistically as Richard Roper, “the worst man in the world,” a philanthropist who is also a secret arms dealer. Elizabeth Debicki is excellent as his self-aware arm candy, Jed, lending vulnerability and humor to a character who would otherwise make very little sense. Sadly, Olivia Colman is wasted as Angela Burr, the pregnant head of a British intelligence agency—and the character’s gender switch (in the book, Burr was male) is a progressive gesture without any weight. The change of venue to the Middle East, too, feels well intentioned but artificial. As episodes pass, the plot twists become increasingly hard to buy, since Roper makes such clumsy errors in judgment—like ignoring “secret” lovers who are practically making “let’s do it” finger gestures—that he comes across as less Dr. No and more Mr. Magoo.

You may want to gaze into Hiddleston’s Aegean-blue eyes anyway. The show is engineered to make you want things—like “Downton Abbey,” it’s essentially aspirational. You’ll want a luxurious vacation in Zermatt or Majorca (but not in Cairo or dreary London). You’ll want pale-blue lingerie. You’ll want to kiss someone so irresistible that you offer him top-secret documents and answer personal questions, even though you have no reasonable motive to do either of those things. You’ll likely want Hiddleston to play James Bond, the role for which this whole show operates as an audition.

“The Night Manager” works best during liquid scenes of chaos, particularly one strong early sequence in which a fancy dinner party turns into a terrifying kidnapping. As the characters dance, the camera becomes one of them, letting our eyes flicker, in succession, over a power broker spinning his nanny; the man’s wife seething in the background; and then a mistress in a moment of fraught joy, swaying with her lover’s little boy. Lovely, allusive passages like that suggest a much better, more subtle adaptation nested inside this one. Silk and secret codes do satisfy certain appetites for two nights. But the spell fades fast, like a boozy sunset.

As I watched, my mind kept drifting to a different British-made six-episode series, “Happy Valley,” which haunted me for months after I watched it, particularly a final sequence that was more unsettling than many entire shows. It’s difficult to write about television like this—adult crime thrillers—because, inevitably, it means ruining plot twists. So fair warning: this review contains spoilers. Stop reading and go watch “Happy Valley” now, on Netflix, because it—especially in its second season—does precisely what “The Night Manager” doesn’t: it finds something original to say about evil. It’s another beautifully produced show, full of magnetic (if less model-pretty) faces. But it’s a keeper.

“Happy Valley” is the story of a grandmotherly cop, Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), whose daughter was raped, gave birth to a son, and then committed suicide. Cawood is raising her grandson, Ryan, with good intentions but also with an edge of rage and grief that colors their every interaction. In the first season, Ryan has a brutal run-in with Tommy Lee Royce, his biological father, a sequence so tense that it’s barely watchable. As the second season starts, Cawood hasn’t recovered from any of this, especially not her conflict with the now imprisoned Royce. People who haven’t seen “Happy Valley” may have heard that it is a show with a “strong female character,” a woman who excels at her job, like the dogged, honorable Burr, on “The Night Manager.” But Catherine Cawood doesn’t have a trace of phony empowerment: although she’s not precisely an antihero, she is a “bloody mess,” as she might put it, as damaged by her past as she is fuelled by it. She’s not a fantasy of resilience but a portrait of how limited that notion is, when it comes to actual suffering.

A series of terrible crimes occurs under Cawood’s nose. Her colleague murders a woman with whom he’d been having an affair, and who had been blackmailing him. A serial killer preys on prostitutes. A prostitute is raped by a client. In addition, Cawood’s sweet sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), a recovering addict, gets involved with a man who has his own troubled history. Most unsettling of all, a mouselike young woman, Frances Drummond (all black spectacles and whispers, in a brilliant performance by Shirley Henderson), becomes a teacher at the local school so that she can build a relationship with Ryan. She intends to bring him closer to his father, whom she’s been visiting in prison.

Each of these plots could easily become a cartoon: the serial killer could reveal a set of stylish kinks; we could watch the rape occur in graphic detail; Drummond could go full “Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” None of that happens. Instead, “Happy Valley” miraculously manages to treat the ugliest behavior imaginable with humane insight, while never letting the perpetrators off the hook. It views crime as an act of weakness, not power. The most frightening sequence in the show involves a seemingly kind act, a surprise birthday gift of an elaborate child’s toy, which devolves into a scene of family rancor so distressing that I had to cover my eyes, as if it were a murder.

In “The Night Manager,” Roper steadily delivers monologues about evil. Only children see the world as rational or meaningful, he argues. “Becoming a man is realizing that it’s all rotten—and realizing how to celebrate that rottenness. That’s freedom.” Le Carré’s world offers us a fantasy of an iconic brand of authority: the cool intellect that allows a strong person to experience the ultimate pleasure, which is total control. Only the shrewdest, most virtuous man in the world can undermine the worst one.

“Happy Valley,” which is set in an unglamorous West Yorkshire pocked with drugs and unemployment, thinks locally, not globally. It regards total control as the childish illusion. For a long time, that teacher seems like a familiar trope. She’s certainly sinister, with her saccharine voice and the clinging way that she interacts with Royce during their visits. (“Happy Valley” is often at its best when dramatizing pathological uses of femininity.) When Cawood goes to see her, late at night, we assume she wants vengeance. In another show, we’d get a kickass showdown.

Instead, the two talk, in a layered, rivetingly performed debate, one inflected by Cawood’s anxiety that Ryan might carry his father’s criminal nature inside him. Drummond argues, feverishly, that evil isn’t inborn. She insists that Royce, however damaged he was by an “awful” childhood, can become “good and kind and gentle and thoughtful— thoughtful . That’s what I see when I listen to him, when I look into his eyes.” Softly but straightforwardly, Cawood shreds her delusions, which are the result not of too little empathy but of too much. She also points out the obvious: if Royce weren’t a muscular, tattooed man with the face of an angel, no woman would defend him. “You’re jealous,” Drummond says, her face lit by what she believes must be true. Cawood smiles, her face hard and full of pity.

It’s a sequence that is world-weary in all senses—wise, complex, intractably sad—a debate about justice that can’t be resolved. But it has real sophistication, the kind that lingers. ♦

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The Night Manager

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Watch The Night Manager with a subscription on Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

Cast & Crew

Tom Hiddleston

Jonathan Pine

Hugh Laurie

Richard Onslow Roper

Olivia Colman

Angela Burr

Tom Hollander

Major Corkoran

Elizabeth Debicki

Jed Marshall

David Harewood

Joel Steadman

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The Night Manager review

Episodes: 6

Premiered: 2016

Duration: 1 hr

A visually stunning spy thriller based on a 1993 novel by John le Carré, The Night Manager is a lush six-part serial that oozes pure class in every scene.

Tom Hiddleston is Jonathan Pine, an ex-soldier and now night manager of a luxury hotel in Cairo. He’s recruited by British intelligence agent – the ever-brilliant Olivia Colman – to infiltrate the inner circle of ‘the worst man in the world’, arms dealer Dicky Roper – played with glee by a career best Hugh Laurie. Things, as you’d hope, do not go strictly to plan.

Elizabeth Debicki, Tom Hollander and Alistair Petrie provide support for this thriller that looks every penny of its not insignificant £30m budget.

Here’s Stuart’s episode-by-episode The Night Manager review.

The Night Manager : episode 1 review

By Stuart Barr on 

March 28, 2016

Adapted from John le Carré’s 1993 novel – his first post-cold war espionage thriller – The Night Manager is BBC drama at its most lavish. Featuring an A-list cast headed up by Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman, a screenplay from acclaimed writer David Farr ( Hanna , Spooks ), and directed by the Danish director Susanne Bier whose 2010 film In A Better World won an Oscar for best foreign language film.

Farr updates le Carré’s novel from the early nineties using the political backdrop of The Arab Spring for a dramatic opening. It is 2011 and former British soldier Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) is the night manager of a luxury hotel in Cairo. The Revolution against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is making his western guests nervous. Flirtatious Egyptian guest Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika) asks him to photocopy some documents. He is shocked to discover they appear to show an arms deal. The seller is Richard Roper (Lurie), a billionaire philanthropist.

Pine shares the documents with an Embassy contact who passes them to British Intelligence. The deal comes to the attention of Angela Burr (Colman), head of an international anti-arms unit in London. Burr attempts to intervene, but it is politically expedient for Roper’s sale to go forward. Better to arm the devils you know. This has tragic results for Pine who has become romantically involved with his source.

Four years later Pine is working as night manager at a resort in Switzerland when his path crosses once more with Roper’s.

This opening episode was all about setting up the chess board. Key pieces were introduced with just enough information to capture attention but a lot was held back. Pine is granted a convincing motivation to pass information about Roper’s activities in Switzerland to Burr, but we are given little to explain Burr’s particular enmity towards him. Undercurrents of class run through the tale. Pine plays the part of the archetypal English gentleman well, but when face to face with Roper and his ‘chums’ (including his officious right hand man played by Tom Hollander) he is instantly treated as a servant. Pine has an air of righteousness, but his profession suggests a man hiding from, or running away from the past and trying to isolate himself from people.

The gruff, northern Burr also has class issues to deal with in Westminster but with the added obstacle of her gender. A meeting with a ministerial aide is pointedly ended when the man retires to his club which has a no women policy. Glaring across the Thames at the gleaming MI-6 building, it is clear that Burr has been cast out into the relative wilds of Victoria by her inability to penetrate the old boys’ network of British Intelligence.

The episode ended with a meeting between Burr and Pine. When asked why he had turned in the documents in Cairo, Pine’s response was marvellously proper: “If there’s a man selling a private arsenal to an Egyptian crook and he’s English… and you’re English… and those weapons can cause a lot of pain to a lot of people. Then you just do it.”

Glossy and perfectly cast, with the sort of international locations that you would expect from a Bond film, The Night Manager was gripping and intriguing entertainment. This opening episode merely hinted at the larger story to come but contained enough to bait the hook and bring you back next week.

Did you tune in for The Night Manager episode 1? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read Stuart’s review of The Night Manager episode 2 here.

The Night Manager

John le Carré

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The Night Manager : episode 2 review

February 22, 2016

Still catching up on The Night Manager episode 2? Read Stuart’s review of episode 1 here.

Beginning in ‘Mallorca, Spain’, Nina Simone sings ‘Plain Gold Ring’ on the soundtrack as Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), the  trophy girlfriend of arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), selects lingerie in hazy sunlight. The dressing is interrupted by a call. A strained conversation with her mother follows, Jed promises money and asks after ‘Billy’ (a son?). That she is not involved with Roper for pure romance is not a shock, but is Jed trapped in her situation or a gold digger?

Roper and guests visit a seaside restaurant. As Jed dances with his young son Daniel there is an attempted robbery that turns into a kidnapping. The men try to abscond with the boy, but Pine is watching them from a kitchen. The story then flashes back to explain how he came to be working as a chef in that particular Chiringuito.

To set up Pine with the perfect back story that will make him interesting to Roper, he is given a fake identity and sent to Devon with orders to make mischief. Arriving in a small village with a general store out of the nineteen fifties – they seem to only have eggs and a couple of tins of soup on the shelves, there is clearly a gap in the market for a SPAR – Pine sets himself up as a drug dealer to engineer a criminal background and a reason to leave the country.

So when he apparently foils the kidnapping attempt in Spain and gets severely beaten in the process, Roper is quick to bring Pine to his home while sinister fixer Lance Corcoran (Tom Hollander) runs a background check. Corcoran is not entirely convinced, with Pine telling him that if he is found to be “stringing us along” he will “hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity.”

This was another fine episode building intrigue and character depth. Colman’s intense performance makes it clear that Burr’s vendetta is personal even as reasons remain elusive. The Etonian ranks of ‘the River House’ – the informal name for MI-6’s Vauxhall HQ – casually condescend to Burr and her “modest enforcement agency”, but she uses this condescension against them. Teaming with American agent Joel Steadman (David Harewood), Burr feeds them information but keeps Pine’s undercover work hidden. This is a dangerous game – a death in episode 1 may have been due to leaked information. One might reasonably question the how wise it was to discuss Pine after a meeting with MI-6, standing by the Thames in front of one of the most CCTV camera encrusted buildings on the planet. But it was a nice shot.

The Night Manager plays with the tropes of escapist fantasy spy thrillers while also having the grit of more serious espionage dramas. From the elegant opening titles – an exploding RPG transformed into a cocktail glass, a spinning tea set becomes the barrel of a revolver – to exotic locations including, in this episode, Mallorca, Switzerland, and… er… Devon, sexual conquests and Hiddlestone’s tailoring, the spirit of Bond is invoked. However, the plotting and psychological complexity of the characters is all le Carré.

It is a difficult balancing act, but the series has deftly skipped across the high wire so far. We will see if it continues to impress as the stakes are increased.

Did you tune in for The Night Manager episode 2? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read Stuart’s review of The Night Manager episode 3 here.

The Night Manager : episode 3 review

February 29, 2016

Still catching up on The Night Manager episode 3? Read Stuart’s review of episode 2 here.

After foiling a (staged) kidnap attempt, Jonathan Pine has infiltrated suspected arms dealer Richard Roper’s Mallorca home – but men as powerful as Roper do not achieve such heights without some amount of paranoia and Pine is closely observed.

Pine needs his wits to get information to Angela Burr – who recruited him to go undercover. His request to take Roper’s son into town is granted, but they are accompanied by suspicious armed chaperones. Clutching a tourist guide, the pregnant Burr passes unnoticed by the bodyguards allowing Pine to deliver a coded message warning that Roper’s right hand man Corkorian is a threat. To counter this Burr’s team create suspicion that Corkorian is alienating business partners with his drinking and flamboyant homosexuality. Roper’s Spanish contact has become wracked with guilt following his daughter’s suicide and the team exploit this to turn him and plant suspicions.

A second front of intrigue opens in Westminster’s corridors of power. Burr’s boss, senior civil servant Rex Mayhew, is keeping her operation (code named Limpet) secret from MI-6, but when he’s called into a meeting with the parliamentary under-secretary he’s pressured to drop the operation by MI-6 and the CIA. Mayhew refuses, but it seems clear that elements in the Intelligence community do not want Roper investigated.

Pine is moving closer to Roper’s girlfriend Jed. This is a dangerous flirtation and Jed also has secrets to keep. Investigating Roper’s office, Pine discovers a blond hair suggesting she is also collecting information on the operation despite her earlier insistence that she has no interest in Roper’s business. The question of why and for whom is left frustratingly unanswered.

This episode saw Pine move from the fringes into the heart of Roper’s operation through guile and manipulation. In kicking Corkorian out of the nest, a potentially deadly enemy has been set up. It is further hinted that Roper’s arms deal may in fact be unofficially backed from within the British establishment. If MI-6 become aware of the identity of Burr’s inside man, things are likely to get very difficult for Pine.

As the reptilian but charming Roper, Hugh Laurie got more screen time this episode. Starring in the US series House moved Laurie away from purely comic roles but The Night Manager positively buries such associations. Laurie was particularly terrific as Roper when explaining his nihilistic worldview: “children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom”. The speech was laced with threat, but we have yet to see Roper’s ruthlessness at close range.

Episode 3 ended with Pine as a new fixture in Roper’s organisation, but with the threat of Burr’s operation being blown open by establishment interests. Pine’s position is also made precarious by his relationship with Jed. How much does Roper actually know? Is his acceptance of Pine into the inner sanctum actually an example of keeping his enemies closer? Episode four cannot come quickly enough.

Did you tune in for The Night Manager episode 3? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read Stuart’s review of The Night Manager episode 4 here.

The Night Manager episode 4 review

March 7, 2016

Still catching up on The Night Manager episode 4? Read Stuart’s review of episode 3 here.

The Night Manager episode 4 will be forever known to a section of the actor’s committed fan base as the one where you see Tom Hiddleston’s buttocks. But it was also the episode where things started to get dangerous.

Pine (Hiddleston) receives another new identity as Andrew Birch, a proxy for the latest arms deal arranged by Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Roper has evaded justice to date because of how skilfully he hides behind front men.

It had been simmering in the previous episode but Pine’s attraction to Roper’s girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) finally boiled over in a torrid bedroom scene. One might think he would have more sense given how his previous relationship with an arms dealer’s girlfriend ended.

Despite attempts to be clandestine, the flirtation has not gone unnoticed by the poisonous Corcoran (Tom Hollander) who nearly blows everything wide open in an uncomfortable restaurant scene with a toast to “the lovers” and thinly veiled taunts to Roper “the blind man who cannot see the human bloody hand grenade in front of his bloody eyes.” Pine manages to emerge from the situation with grace, but has a seed of doubt been planted in Roper? Whether those doubts are regarding Jed and Pine or concern ‘good old Corky’ becoming a drunken liability is unclear.

There is a growing sense that Pine is attracted to adrenaline and danger, which may be why he is eager to jump into bed with Jed despite it being obviously a very stupid thing to do. Pine is also clearly seduced by Roper’s lavish lifestyle. When he is shown a bank statement for the company Roper has put him in charge of, you can practically see dollar signs flash in his eyes.

Finally we learned some of the reasons for Burr’s personal hatred of Roper with a harrowing tale of a gas attack on a school in Iraq. Roper was not behind this in any way, but he was present and saw the horrific effects of mustard gas and sarin on children – and it was because of this that he decided there was a market to sell sarin. Burr saw dead children. Roper saw a business opportunity. It is a scene powerfully played by Olivia Colman and a reminder of the horror funding Roper’s lifestyle.

In London, a clumsy attempt to intimidate Burr’s boss Mayhew (Douglas Hodge) only reinforces his resolve and increases her funding. Pine has supplied Burr with a paper trail demonstrating that Roper is being aided in his arms deals by corruption from within MI-6. In fact this corruption may go beyond the ‘River House’, when Mayhew reveals the evidence to the parliamentary under-secretary who wants Burr replaced, the news gets back to Roper. Whitehall is leaking all over the place. With MI-6 now aware that there is a mole in Roper’s operation, Burr’s team must scramble to divert suspicion away from Pine.

When Burr’s team intercept a late night phone call between Jed and Pine and attempt to pull him out of the operation Pine has other ideas. Acting the maverick he exposes them without revealing his own complicity. Is he going rogue? How much do we really know about this man?

Did you tune in for The Night Manager episode 4? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read Stuart’s review of The Night Manager episode 5 here.

The Night Manager episode 5 review

March 14, 2016

Still catching up on The Night Manager episode 5? Read Stuart’s review of episode 4 here.

The Night Manager ’s previous episode saw Jonathan Pine apparently going rogue when his intelligence handlers tried to pull him out of Roper’s operation, leaving Angela Burr unsure if Pine has been turned.

Vested and powerful interests in the British establishment want Roper’s arms deal to succeed – there is talk of ‘the national interest’ but really it comes down to people lining their pockets. Despite Burr’s efforts to keep the investigation secret, Roper knows there is a leak in his operation and suspects everyone. He reveals his suspicions to Pine, stating “anyone can betray anyone, Jonathan”. Is this an act of tactical stupidity on Roper’s part, or does he enjoy an atmosphere of misrule?

For four episodes we have seen only the glamour of the arms trade: Roper’s private island; his jet; Michelin starred restaurants; tailored suits; a trophy girlfriend with a wardrobe of diaphanous kaftans. Who wouldn’t be tempted by such a life? However, as Roper brings his prospective buyer to a remote area of Turkey near the border with Syria, we finally witness the brutal reality of both his trade and his personality. Posing for photo opportunities with refugee children, while trading in the very weapons that have displaced these people.

With Pine serving as ringmaster, Roper stages a demonstration of his wares that is pure circus. Tracer bullets light up the night sky, drones are shot out of the air with missiles, cluster bombs turn a village into dust, and in a showstopper finale a napalm drop turns the landscape into a vision out of Dante. Later Pine will learn that the deserted village was recently inhabited, its denizens forcibly evicted to provide Roper with a sandcastle to kick over. However, not all the inhabitants were able to leave in time.

As Roper, Hugh Laurie has, until this point, been charming with a dash of sinister – but in The Night Manager episode 5 his mask slips to reveal something very ugly. He has his girlfriend Jed flown in and trotted out like a prize filly in front of mercenaries to humiliate her. In private he becomes abusive. His former right hand man Corky – whose role Pine supplanted – is on hand to further stoke suspicions. Knowing that Corkorian suspects him of having an affair with Jed, Pine desperately tries to get information to Burr and move Roper’s suspicions towards ‘good old Corky’.

Back in London, Burr is increasingly politically isolated. MI-6 chief Dromgoole has her under conspicuous surveillance and arrives on her doorstep late at night to make vague threats. When Pine’s information that Roper is using an aid convoy to transport his arms across the Turkish border, Burr has a last chance to snare her quarry.

Director Susanne Bier switched out the the glossy sun drenched palate of earlier episodes for desert sand and khaki, taking The Night Manager into an uglier world of refugee camps and mercenaries. As the episode came to an end it found Roper smugly triumphant: “they didn’t watch the cups you see”, he tells Pine. Still with his cover apparently intact, Pine is horrified to find out their next destination is Cairo and the very hotel where he was once the night manager.

Did you tune in for The Night Manager episode 5? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read Stuart’s review of The Night Manager episode 6 here.

The Night Manager episode 6 review

March 21, 2016

Spoilers for The Night Manager episode 6 below. Still catching up? Read Stuart’s review of episode 5 here.

Angela Burr and Jonathan Pine both find themselves in tight spots at the beginning of this concluding episode.

After failing to find arms in Roper’s aid convoy, Burr is hauled in front of an enquiry facing the very people she suspects of covertly working with him. Meanwhile, Pine is unwillingly back in Cairo where Roper’s associate Freddie Hamid may recognise and connect him to the girlfriend killed for leaking details of a deal four years earlier.

But Pine and Burr gain a second chance to expose Roper – dependent upon the stealing of some documents from his hotel safe. To do this, Pine must ask Jed to risk her life, find the safe’s code and take the documents without Roper discovering they are missing.

The Night Manager episode 6 brought the series to a suspenseful conclusion, but also raised nagging questions. The most perplexing being ‘is Roper an idiot?’ Aware his operation has a mole, who should he suspect is feeding information to his enemies? Jed, his girlfriend of some years; Sandy Langbourne, the business associate with almost as much to lose; Corky, the loyal psychopath; or Pine, a charming stranger who seems extremely interested in his business?

Roper was awfully quick to accept Pine’s story that Corky was the traitor and that he killed him in self defence. But was Roper playing a long game to smoke out those acting against his interests? A veiled conversation with Pine in this episode suggested this when Roper tells Pine “even traitors can be forgiven.”

However, when he finally stumbled into the snare Pine had set up for him Roper seemed genuinely shocked. “It’s a very rare thing Jonathan Pine, for me to trust a person. But you were special. I knew it the first moment I saw you.” Almost touching were it not for the fact that he had just had his girlfriend brutally tortured.

As Roper was finally caught, Burr dryly remarked “he deserves it”, but what has she actually achieved? One less arms dealer perhaps, but the trade remains. Those in Westminster who greased wheels for Roper continue to be in power. And what of the three hundred million pounds Pine took as leverage to keep Jed alive? He doesn’t give this back. Where did it go? Will Pine’s bank manager be very happy come Monday morning? If so, does this knock the shine off his halo?

Performances have gone a long way towards keeping our disbelief suspended. As Pine, Hiddleston brought a stylish blankness to the character making it easy to suspect that he might become seduced by the glamour of Roper’s world. Hugh Laurie convinced us Roper was more cunning than he was and always ensured an edge of cold steel was visible behind his charm. Olivia Colman as Burr brought earthiness, grounding the series in a recognisable reality whenever private jets and island retreats threatened to make it seem like fantasy.

In The Night Manager , there has been tension between the shadow world of espionage and the glamorous, sun drenched, playboy fantasy of Roper’s world. Director Susanne Bier has done a tremendous job making this world compelling and attractive, but perhaps at the expense of getting dirty in the grease and blood of the arms trade. Bier and writer David Farr pulled the story together with an exciting climax – but one that was a little bit too neat.

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Indigo Cafe & Bar

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Montevallo, AL 35115

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Indigo Cafe + Bar is a premier elevated dining restaurant in Montevallo, AL, offering an exceptional culinary experience with a touch of sophistication. With our stunning visuals and delectable dishes, we provide a dining experience that captures the essence of elegance and humility. …

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We tried indigo cafe for the first time and it was great. We had three French dips and it was one of the best I have ever had. I would highly recommend that. The chicken salad trio was also great. One other person in our party got the chicken and waffles at brunch and they said it was amazing also. The staff were all nice and very helpful.

We stopped in on a Saturday for an early lunch. They had not been opened long and we got seated pretty quickly. They offer a large drink/bar selection so you can have a drink while you decide on your meal. Since the location just opened timing/wait time kinks are still being worked on but overall we had no complaints and our food was good. The restaurant is in the heart of Montevallo in an older building with plenty of charm.

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Everything was awesome. I'm so glad this restaurant here. We are definitely going to put it on a regular rotation.

The decor made me feel as though I had stepped into an upscale restaurant somewhere other than my town. The service was excellent. I chose to have the French Dip. It was tender and delicious. My friend and I decided to have a glass of wine after our meal. I chose chardonnay. Never have I tested the "notes" of anything. However, I tasted floral notes on the back of my tongue. It's the best I ever had. I highly recommend Indigo's. Will definitely return.

Want to share the word about a new dining option for downtown Montevallo! This is a promising restaurant that has the potential to be a top tier choice! Anyone local that wants a nice meal, a different option for brunch or lunch, or a night out as well as the slew of families in town for college sports & activities, this is a good choice. We were very impressed with the front of house manager Isa and his interest in the quality of our meal as well as any feedback. We enjoyed the eclectic atmosphere filled with a mix of art and antiques as well as the gorgeous bar pictured. They offer a full bar, wine choices and handcrafted cocktails. The soup of the day was a creamy Parmesan artichoke which was quite tasty. Need a place for a group gathering? Book club, gals night out, you name it!, they can accommodate you. With some more word of mouth & a few tiny tweaks, I see Cafe Indigo garnering lots of attention in the restaurant space.

I went here today 2/16 and was pretty disappointed. We were the first ones in the restaurant, 20 minutes after it opened. We gave our orders, my 2 friends ordered the huge and I ordered the chicken and waffles. The chicken and waffles are part of the brunch menu which was not being served this day, but the waitress assured us they were serving brunch. So then 5 minutes later she come back and tells me they don't have it, which I assumed since they weren't supposed to be serving it. So I ended up getting the burger like my friends. The food took about an hour, even though we were the first ones and it was not busy. The fries were cold and there was tomato on my friends burger that he requested to be removed.I finished my water 5 minutes in and didn't get refilled until I received the bill. The waitress was very inattentive. My friends burger also had parchment paper cooked on it when it was brought out to him the second time. Very disappointed with the service and quality of the food

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Nick Schroeder’s perfect day includes a show in South Paris and vintage shopping in Biddeford

The communications manager for Space and member of Mad Horse Theatre Company would also make Rockland and several Portland shops part of the itinerary.

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Nick Schroeder, 42, of Portland, is communications manager and multidisciplinary programmer for Space, a nonprofit arts venue in Portland. He’s also an actor, director and ensemble member with Mad Horse Theatre Company in South Portland. A native of Old Orchard Beach, he’s worked as a journalist and editor at several local publications.

As much as I like bopping around the state by myself, I’ll spend my perfect Maine day with my partner, Mallory, and our nearly 3-year-old toddler. The kid’s in the stage of life where she asks why to just about everything, and that question makes for good conversation.

Getting dressed (finding pants, socks, etc. and negotiating their deployment) can take a while in my house, so we’ll put on WMPG to keep the energy loose. I’ll pour a good cup of coffee, Speckled Ax Early Riser preferred , in my clunky travel mug. Then we’ll get things cracking at that one real good climbing tree in the park for a little proprioceptive rinse. The branches are real low to the ground and I don’t have to worry about my kid taking any nasty falls.

The Palace Diner in Biddeford. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Will Zu Bakery still have croissants by now, or is that too much morning meandering? The neighbors tend to swarm the little West End spot – how is it this good? – and it can quickly sell out. If that’s the case, we’ll drive south. Actually, scratch that – Mallory will drive this leg, and I’ll bike. Our destinations will be the same, Palace Diner (in Biddeford). I’ll have the omelet du jour and those great big potatoes, and maybe a bite of my kid’s pancake – the dad handbook clearly states that you must eat your children’s leftovers. We’ll all poke our heads inside Biddeford Vintage Market and see what new vendors they’ve got (my aunt Barb runs the place with some friends) before making a quick spin into Color.Sound.Oblivion to check their newly stocked records.

The Basico – an arepa stuffed with chicken, cheese and pico de gallo – with a side of pan de bono and a cup of verduritas (spicy green sauce) from Maiz in Portland. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

With family who live nearby, I’ll be able to ditch the bike and hop into the car, heading north. We’ll stop in Portland to grab a couple of arepas for the road from the outrageously good Colombian food restaurant Maïz, and head to South Paris. In this fantasy, the Celebration Barn has a perfectly timed matinee show, and true to form, it’s equally enchanting for kids and adults.

The Celebration Barn in South Paris. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

After that, we’ll drive to Rockland (here’s where the kid naps) and head to a beach (any beach) before I pop into Curator , one of few consignment shops that bothers to stock nice stuff for tall fellas. Then it’s over to Rock City Cafe for a refill and a poke around Hello Hello Books behind the cafe. Last time, I found a nice used paperback of a Judy Chicago biography. Will I get this lucky again?

A stack of books at Print: A Bookstore in Portland. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Returning to Portland, we’ll have had our fill of driving and Raffi sing-alongs. It’s time for our A-list East End retail trifecta – Ferdinand  for handmade wonders, Starry Eyes  for snazzy kids’ stuff, and Print: A Bookstore (more books!).

For dinner, the ideal is Asmara , the great Eritrean gem, where we as a family can share big communal plates of colorful food using only our hands as utensils. After we put the kid to bed, I’ll text a friend, and if his kid’s asleep, too, we can sneak out for a little nightcap at the Continental and discuss the news.

How would you spend your perfect Maine day? Send your itinerary, in 500 words or less, with a little about yourself, to [email protected] .

A Belhaven beer, a Negroni and a pint of Guinness at The Continental in Portland. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

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