Word: stranger
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...STRANGER...
...Stranger, subtitled A Novel About the Fourth Man, the narrator concludes: "They picked carefully and they picked well... I feel it was no accident that their four most successful recruits were all taken from the ranks of those who considered themselves unloved." He adds: "It was the adultery of the soul that claimed most of their spare time." In this arrangement of the Cantabrigian quartet, Bryan Forbes, the English actor, director (The L-Shaped Room) and novelist, homes in onTheo Gittings, who bears a passing resemblance to Blunt. Theo, a brilliant, alienated invert who becomes a pillar of the literary...
Twisting through its labyrinthine course, Stranger provides vivid profiles of Burgess, Maclean and Philby, who appear as themselves, but the many-tiered novel is most affecting in its depictions of love true and false, at home, abroad and long gone. It is in these passages that the novel persuasively insinuates a chill, echoing question: The fourth man has been identified, but is there a fifth, sixth - even an nth man out there...
Edward Kennedy on why he was tending a stranger's pet outside a primary polling place in Washington, D.C.: "I had to hold his dog to get his vote...
...opening "purple silence" of a shadeless summer's day we anticipate the novel's first steps. A stranger walks slowly into the landscape, this "frame of almost human expectancy," and advances, with Hardy-like fatality, toward the summer house of a famous old astronomer who seems to have "already reached the end of the world." A violently freakish tempest roars...