The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

This brilliant novel adds John le Carré's name to the microscopically small list of really great writers of espionage fiction. In truth, it does a great deal more. It is the spy novel to end all spy novels. It dispatches the spun-sugar secret agents of recent fame back to their comic-opera Graustarks forever. Its central figure, Leamas, whose mission is to trap the top spy of East Berlin, is a creation of astonishing reality and authenticity. The plot he sets in motion, and later becomes the principal victim of, is a thing of magnificent complexity. Also of far-reaching implications. For the tension within Leamas is strikingly contemporary. It is the tension of a committed man unable to come to terms with the utterly ruthless machine he serves. Only in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Graham Greene's "burnt-out cases" can any comparison be found.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a novel of the first order—terrifying in its significance, impressive in its actuality, awesome in its high political import. It happens also to be immensely thrilling.