Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's been on my bookshelves for almost 20yrs. Guess it's time to read it--serendipitously it looks like a new movie based on book is about to come out.



I could never quite get full-on into this book. Some sections really engaged me and I thought it was going to work for me, but it was tenuous and I'd lose it for 20 or so pages. Too cerebral? Too at a distance? Too much assumed knowledge about the British spy world? I don't know for sure.



Still, as with the other le Carre I've read you get much more than a mere spy novel. Take this reflection, near the end of the novel, as Smiley considers on the conspiracy he has helped to uncover:



"Like an actor, he had a sense of the approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgments in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible...he wondered if there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion...It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation" (327).



It kind of reminds me of Eastwood's "Unforgiven" where as we root for the main character to win over his adversaries, the narrative itself pulls the rug out from us, forcing us to see that there are no conquests really, only people. Of course "Unforgiven" is much darker.







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