For quite some time, this was one of the most amazing successes in the genre of espionage fiction. It reined supreme. The reading public had never seen anything quite like it. Everyone knew John LeCarre was a spy writer and that he was 'rather good'. Everyone--absolutely everyone--was aware of the landmark, the juggernaut which he had already achieved some years previously: 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'. No one --I think--expected him to equal that triumph; no one expected him to follow that book with anything else as noteworthy. 'Cold' suddenly made the genre impeccable; it brought espionage up to the caliber of any fiction being written anywhere in the British-speaking world. It was a tremendous feat. And then there were a few years which went by and then LeCarre comes up with this amazing book. People were perhaps only vaguely aware that his books were a continuing series; with an established set of re-appearing characters. They didn't know what he was really capable of until this hit the market; and then everyone got it. It suddenly became clear really, what a spy novel could do; what a spy novel could encompass. LeCarre--in really a masterful, quiet, devoted manner--really crafted something special here. For the first time (I believe) readers were treated to something quite new. 'Tinker, Tailor' continues the dramatic arc of a narrative premise which LeCarre started writing more than 10-15 years prior; when he created the Smiley character; when he created some of the other figures in his fictional world of British espionage services. The plot in 'Tinker' reaches backwards in time and brings those characters forward--and this is the heart of LeCarre's technique. LeCarre's people are just-like-us in that their lives span out across events and history; each character has a rich interior life extending backwards into the past, fanning out behind them. His stories wend their way among a jumble of poignant little mnemonic fragments which is tied to each figure; fragments maybe mentioned only briefly in a completely previous LeCarre work. Half-remembered allusions; scraps of near-forgotten admissions or confessions, are how his plots must resolve; and they are based on a trail of breadcrumbs dropped from a series of all his previous books. He makes new use of these wisps, they become the caked, muddy foreground for a new mystery which Smiley must solve, here in 'Tinker'. For the reader, there's this wonderful redolence from seeing faintly-familiar names re-mentioned; hearing characters discuss their old history with each other--just as happens in real life. Characters with memories; reaching back; re-playing old decisions and accidents and turning-points and gestures from LeCarre books you last read perhaps five years earlier...really, this is a collaborative pursuit which the reader participates with LeCarre on a personal level; purely from having read all those previous LeCarre outings. No other genre author had the creativity to provide this sense of 'shared history' for readers; the shared-history which Smiley must sift through as he goes about his discouraging investigatory task [researching the history of his friendships; colleagues; his marriage]. There is a Soviet mole in his department--and it must be discovered whom--and the only way to do it, is with soul-searching. The materiele for that introspection is what we know well and care about fondly, if we've been reading Le Carre at all. We share in Smiley's urgent, private hunt for that suspected, hidden figure, the alleged burrower who--if he exists--has manipulated Smiley's life and his career for years. We share in this plot with an eagerness such as few stories of any kind in modern British lit, can invoke. And when he catches him, he will solve in one stroke a national problem and a personal problem. This is the reason why espionage-fiction is the most literary of any genre because it reflects our outward social institutions and the inward psychology of the isolated citizen. LeCarre's writing is the heir to fiction like that of Doyesteovsky: man vs state.This 'introspective' technique out previously, (somewhat) in "Spy Who--", because the trial of poor Alec Leamas in East Germany hinged on a scrap of circumstance mentioned earlier in 'Call for the Dead'--the cryptic business trip by Mundt--but here, in 'Tinker' this 'back-pedaling' is exercised even more vigorously. Its a novel of self-scrutiny. See, the quality which makes LeCarre's 'mole' stories so wonderful is that the elusive quarry is not 'one of them'. Not some wily, slippery foreigner in some distant land which our agents must go out and destroy in 'James Bond'-fashion. Instead: the evildoer, the enemy, the culprit in 'Tinker' is 'one of us'...one of the members of the establishment. And in order to unmask that infiltrator you have to--and Le Carre does--ruminate upon whole swathes of British culture and society (or as much as you can ruminate, within the confines of a thriller). This is why great espionage writing is so rewarding. It forces self-study; forces you to gaze at your own society to spot the covered-up falsehoods. Perhaps only in Charles Dickens' works--where, impassioned characters and their schemes cross lengthy intervals and lifetimes--or in the Sherlock Holmes stories (where Watson describes the history of Holmes and Moriarty) does such a 'feeling' agenda, appear. LeCarre's brilliant technique radiated a new depth to the traditional spy story in a way that pays faith entirely to itself--and to its genre. The resulting novel is a savory reading experience which satisfies fully well on its own, but--as the capstone to the career of the man who had just written, 'In from the Cold'--well, its really just a-stounding. In two swift strokes, John LeCarre gave us the definitive 'defector' novel and the definitive 'mole' novel. Think about how singular that is; understand why no one can touch LeCarre in his genre.
When it comes to the spy novel, John le Carre is the undisputed master. The man can fill a typically unexciting scene, say of a character reading letters, with enough suspense and tension to leave the reader tight-lipped and breathless as they hurriedly flip to the next page. His spies are not the supermen of Hollywood like Bond and Bourne, but instead are unathletic, unassuming people who tend to either resemble washed-up pugilists or sallow-cheeked bank clerks.Le Carre's George Smiley is the epitome of this type. Where Bond is fit, brash, headstrong, charismatic and possesses pheromones that render women powerless to resist him, Smiley is short, dumpy, highly analytic and methodical, and has just been left by his wife again after sleeping with one of his oldest friends, just the latest in her long line of conquests. To top it off he has been summarily fired from his career as number two of Britain's intelligence service, disavowed by most of his former colleagues and has now been assigned the very difficult task of uprooting a mole that the Russians have placed near the very top of the British spy agency.This is the point in the movie where Bond would grab his assault rifle, rough up some hoods, bed a minx and have a climactic battle atop Mt. Kilamanjaro. Not good old George Smiley, though. He hunts his quarry with all of the patience and tenacity of a komodo dragon following prey it has bitten, certain that the bacteria in the wound will bring it down soon enough. There are no high-speed chases, bombs or last minute escapes. Rather every move is calculated to the nth degree, every possible outcome weighed and judged, like grandmasters staring over their chess pieces. When the climax comes it is not with a furious bang but with the plodding inevitability of the tortoise crossing the finish line.I have a massive soft spot for books of this sort, that rely on its protagonist slowly piecing together bits of information to form a coherent story. Le Carre is a master of keeping his readers in the dark. I have made some comments in other places about sometimes being unsure whether le Carre was being deliberately obscure so as to heighten the sense of mystery or whether I was reading the book out of order with the rest of the series and he was just referring to events from prior books. While at times this was frustrating, it also gave me the urge to speed through the book and see what answers would finally be revealed. The Cold War may be long over (has it really been nearly 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell?), the Russians now our titular allies, but le Carre's books act like snapshots for this time period they are so grittily real. When his grim-faced agents meet on a wind-scoured hill overlooking a small city, haunted by a lifetime of having to make the least-evil choice, you can fairly smell the cigarette smoke waft off the page, mingling with the scent of whiskey and burned coal and utterly transporting you into his world. I didn't think I was going to be in the mood for a thriller of this sort, but now I've half a mind to dive into one or two of the other le Carre's stacked alongside my shelves next.
What do You think about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2002)?
And thus began what would be a year and a half-long obsession with George Smiley and his British Circus. Having now read every last book in which Smiley is even cursorily mentioned, I can say steadfast that this is Le Carre's masterwork. It is a warm, immersive book. It draws you in like a warm sweater, and keeps you suspended weightless and happy in its alternate world. I literally read this book three times in a row before moving on to the next in the trilogy (The Honourable Schoolboy). It is one of the very few books I know I'll re-read, over and over, for the rest of my life.
—gaby
Oft billed as the "anti-Ian Flemming," John Le Carre inverts all the typical trappings of the spy-thriller: in place of the handsome, gadget-happy g-man we're given a sacked, middle-aged cuckold whose attention to detail and intellectual virtuosity quietly derail Moscow Central's invisible vise-grip on the Circus.Note that "quietly," as the tension here is all cerebral, the violence and spectacle off-stage, and the stakes themselves, though no less dire than the fate of the world, are entirely ideological.The Cold War assurance of mutual destruction provides the British imagination with a field of conflict perfectly tailored to the restriction of overt or "hot" action (Smiley's also impotent), which is then carefully sublimated through elaborately mannered, gentlemanly games of intelligence and subterfuge. Himself a former blown secret agent for MI6, Le Carre writes with all the authority and flare one would expect from a once genuine article, though without all the lurid technical gun-fetishism of a Tom Clancy or Ian Flemming. A great deal of the prose is composed of contextually self-evident turns of phrase that seems to have bucked a number of readers at this site--while not jargon, this writing style suggests a world behind the world more interested in demonstrating, rather than explaining, itself.
—Derrick
I never had much of a desire to read TTSS. I knew about John Le Carre, and his books were heavy on my parents' bookshelves, but I never really felt moved to read them. Then I saw the preview for the new movie (2011/2012). It stars Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, John, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Tom Hardy. And you know if it's British it will have all those actors(male and female) that you know, including in this case Owen of the Sheep from The Vicar of Dilby.As Stan Lee says, 'Nuff said.I tried to read the book before I saw the movie, but I couldn't locate my parents' copy and ended up seeing the movie before reading the book.In this case, the movie does the book justice.TTSS tells the story of George Smiley who is tasked to find a spy. This means that Smiley must dig into the past of those who ousted/replaced him and Control, his boss at the Circus (MI something). This Coup d'Etat occured, in part, because of a botched operation, started by control to flush out a Russian sleeper agent who works for Karla, the Russian version of Control, and a man Smiley tried to turn. It's not so much a tale of cat and mouse, but of mouse and rats.Smiley seems to be an everyman, and he is. This isn't James Bond. At the heart of the story are relationships, both of husband/wife as well as friends, lovers, and co-workers. And of that of enemies.The writing is powerful, and the most gripping scence is that of Smiley relating his only encounter with Karla. (A scene acted beautifully in the movie). It is one of those books were the tension builds and ebbs without you quite being aware of it until you are in fact aware of it.
—Chris
