Having enjoyed the 2011 "Tinker" movie so much I wanted to read the book but thought it best to start at the beginning, with this, the first George Smiley book and Le Carre's first novel. Le Carre presents his characters at a certain remove from us so that we want to lean in, as it were, to see them better. He preserves for them a high degree of opacity (like the porcelain shepherdess in a crucial scene) so that their motives, their loyalties -- to nation, party, spouse -- are never quite visible to us, and so what we think we know about them comes from uncertain inference. Suspenseful!