Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
by John le Carre
A George Smiley novel
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Mystery stories are funny; you almost can't evaluate them until you're done reading them.  I linked to an article a few weeks back suggesting that readers (and, for that matter, writers) do not need to finish books, but that mindset clearly doesn't work for a book like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  There's a mole in the Circus (British Intelligence).  But who is it?  Well, if you never find out, it's not much of a story, is it?  The conclusion to a great mystery has to be foreseeable in hindsight but far from obvious.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy does a fine job here.

The story is more complex than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the other le Carre novel I read, with a bigger scope and more characters.  The ending is perhaps not quite as satisfying, but I think that is part of what makes the book interesting.  The various "good guys" characters have different reactions to the ultimate ferreting out of the mole, but whether they are angry or sad or relieved, none of them are happy.  None of them feels like, "Yeah, we just nabbed the bad guy!  Woohoo!"  That's one of the elements that make le Carre novels a bit deeper than your run-of-the-mill thriller.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carre
A George Smiley novel
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Gold Dagger Award

Like 1984, this is a story I probably would have appreciated more if I'd been older during the Cold War.  Don't get me wrong: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a great read.  It manages to be fast-paced and crisp without having much actual action.  Le Carre leaves the reader in the right amount of suspense; you never have quite enough information to know everything that's going on, but there are sufficient clues to guess.  The plot twists are convincing, and it's a tight story.

The element that elevates Spy to the pantheon of spy novels is its moral ambiguity.  At the height of the Cold War there were the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.  And the Good Guys did good things and stood for good stings and the Bad Guys did the opposite.  Spy turned that on its head by having Good Guys who did some bad things, and Bad Guys for whom we can have some sympathy.  The conversation where this is spelled out was a bit didactic and preachy, but the notion does provoke thought, even if it's lost a bit of the impact it had in 1964 when the book was published.