The perfection of the pacing and plot aside, John le Carré is an exceptional writer, giving just the right detail to create a scene and navigating the complexities of class and society with an artists ease. The characters have their unique views and they express them profoundly.
Plus his spy-jargon is pitch-perfect and so smoothly inserted into the story that it took me half the book to realise I was reading something like "the headmen scoping a deaddrop picked up a double they could use for stock with the Cousins" and knew exactly what was going on without even thinking about it.
Apart from the cold war stuff, where we ar supposed to root for the rests of the English empire, there ar also bits where yu ar supposed to know what an “old Alvis”¹ looks like. The rest is upper middle clas English men in the 1970s being upper middle clas English men from the 1950s. (They ar extra conservativ, yu see.) With all the casual sexism³, clasism, chauvinism and whateverism yu expect.
“… Which will cost him ten bob …”. Oh, dear. The 1950s bit was supposed to be a joke, but Our Hero Smiley has not adjusted to the 1970s with no shillings, and still thinks that 50 p is real money.
“‘Gerstmann's gaze made me feel like a fifth-rate imperialist oppressor.’ He smiled. ‘And that I assuredly am not.’” Fourth rate? Third rate? I wouldn’t go as high as second rate.
You lose …
Boring and outdated.
Apart from the cold war stuff, where we ar supposed to root for the rests of the English empire, there ar also bits where yu ar supposed to know what an “old Alvis”¹ looks like. The rest is upper middle clas English men in the 1970s being upper middle clas English men from the 1950s. (They ar extra conservativ, yu see.) With all the casual sexism³, clasism, chauvinism and whateverism yu expect.
“… Which will cost him ten bob …”. Oh, dear. The 1950s bit was supposed to be a joke, but Our Hero Smiley has not adjusted to the 1970s with no shillings, and still thinks that 50 p is real money.
“‘Gerstmann's gaze made me feel like a fifth-rate imperialist oppressor.’ He smiled. ‘And that I assuredly am not.’” Fourth rate? Third rate? I wouldn’t go as high as second rate.
You lose track of what is going on rather quickly. Or rather, there isn’t really anything going on. So, yes, starting about ¼ in, Smiley tries to find out who, if any, may be the high-level mole, but he does it in the most boring way, reading old documents and reminiscing about meetings and memos. Who cares about fictional office politics‽ Some time around chapter 21 there is some mention of someone named Tarr. Yu ar supposed to remember the name. Turns out, he’s the one who pretty much started the Big Mole Hunt with some story he told in chapter 6. Yeah, well. Maybe if there hadn’t been dozens of other names mentiond in between.
The hight of action is the roughly two chapters of one guy exfiltrating a file from his own agency’s archives, or maybe the half page of some guy waving a pistol around and getting hit in the face. OK, the action hero being shot while trying to escape. Then we get a brethles description of Our Hero making a spredsheet with the dates of messages from another spy. Exciting!
Some call this dull non-story of document reading good writing. I disagree. The scene setting descriptions ar usually done poorly. At one point some woman is talking to Smiley, showing him some memorabilia in her flat, and next the two ar under a tree. Wait. Oh, reading the dialog tags carefully, there is the briefest mention they went for a walk. A bit later, some teacher is letting a scool boy⁴ drive his car, there is mention of some trees and a checkerd flag, and then, nothing. No crash, no stopping the car, the boy is just suddenly no longer in the car.
¹ This from the time the French built the DS and everybody else ponton stile cars. ³ One guy “consoled a pretty secretary”. The whole book is all “‘women, so emotional’ ‘i know old chap’”. One guy uses “effeminate” as self-depreciation. ⁴ Another bit easily lost to non-English readers. This is at a “prep scool”, and yu ar supposed to know that this means primary scool, i.e. rufly 8–13 year olds. So, yeah, we hav primary scool boys driving a car. Still beats the drunk driving the adults do.
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