Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre

My second, and I’m certain, my last, John Le Carre book. I read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold a week ago. I liked that one better, a little, but neither enough to read another.

I admit, spy thrillers are not my genre, so take my feelings with that grain of salt; but I look for more thrills in a thriller. In both books very little action occurs. Apparently the British love that Le Carre’s George Smiley is a more dogged, dull, rumpled, and real-type spy than the Bond known as James. Though born in England, Bond always seemed continental and then lost his English character entirely when he emigrated to Hollywood. Smiley is a thoroughly domestic spy. He doesn’t even leave London environs or meet a foreigner anywhere in this story. I have no problem with the character Smiley; it’s the books.

What excitement there is comes parceled out as stories told by one character to another, reminiscing, or in an interview. The centerpiece of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a series of conversations. The centerpiece here is Smiley, sitting alone in a hotel room reviewing files. Seriously. The files have to be snuck in from headquarters, but there’s no danger. As he reads, George augments what’s in the notes with his own memories of the events he’s reading about. This non-action, comprises the entirety of Part II of this three part novel (pp.127- 276) plus a little more. Ho-hum.

The central episode of the first part of the novel is an interview. The subject, Rikki Tarr, tells a story of spy-work he had done in Hong Kong involving the Russians. The novel was written and takes place in the mid-70s: by which time the cold war was growing cold. Tarr’s story is good but the drama is undercut because it’s told as a story from one man to a group of others, sitting in a parlor room in a house in London. The action is second-hand. It feels distant. At one point Tarr reads from the diary of woman he had an affair with as part of his story, so now the story comes third-hand.

When an author presents the telling of a story, rather than the story itself, the effect is to put emphasis on the information, rather than the action. The author is providing knowledge, rather than an experience. I don’t mind that, but Tarr’s story is so filled with code names, and in-house jargon, and so often interrupted by the others in the room, I could barely understand. Smiley listens to Tarr’s story with interest and he seems to be gathering what he needs for some purpose, but I couldn’t at all figure out why Smiley was there or what he was learning. Then Smiley goes off to start reviewing his files and I still have no idea what his mission is supposed to be. This was my deepest frustration with the novel. For the longest time I had no clue what it was about. A further confusion is that the very beginning of the book introduces not Smiley or Tarr but a man named Jim Prideaux arriving as an end-of-term substitute teacher at a boy’s school and involving an admiring boy named Bill Roach. I kept reading, trusting eventually the point would be revealed, it finally was, for me about page 200, just past the halfway point of the book. I have a lot of patience but this book nearly defeated it.

So here’s the story. Apparently, during the time George Smiley still worked for the British intelligence service he calls, “The Circus”, the head of the outfit, named “Control” became convinced that there was a mole operating at the highest level. Control tried to uncover the mole but was unsuccessful. Then Smiley retires and Control dies and a new guy, Peter Alleline, takes over. But the mole is still in place and eventually higher-ups in the British ministry bring Smiley in, surreptitiously, to figure out who it is. “Tinker”, “Tailor” and so on, are the code names Control invented to name the possible suspects. Smiley himself was “Beggerman” but he was dropped from suspicion after he left the service.

Sounds like a good story, huh? But then Smiley checks-in to his room at the inn and starts reading files. The story gets doled out. It’s very complicated. Lots of characters, many with multiple names. The story becomes clear, slowly, but how any of this is helping Smiley identify the mole is never clear to me. He seems to be reading, and reminiscing, but not investigating.

Eventually, in Part III, we’re told, (again told) the story of Control’s last attempt to uncover the mole. This time it’s Jim Prideaux relating the story, to Smiley, in Smiley’s room at the inn. Jim had been an agent, too. He’s wounded in a disastrous attempt to learn the mole’s identity from a Russian agent in Czechoslovakia, then Jim is farmed out to the boy’s school to heal his wounds. This story is the best in the book. Smiley gets the same story a second time from a different British agent involved in the episode, which is a very nice bit of story-telling. There’s an ambush in the woods outside Brno. Then there’s Jim captured and spilling what he knows to the Russians.

Somehow, Smiley draws some conclusions from all this. I have no idea what information Smiley uses to figure out what’s going on. I never did. Maybe I just miss hand-holding because of the coronavirus but I longed for even one explicit, “Aha!” that put spy and spy obviously together. Even at the very end, it seems Smiley uncovers the mole not by reasoning out from his file-reading but by laying a trap and waiting to see who shows up.

When the mole is revealed it might as well have been any of them so there’s no satisfying way to boast, “I knew it all the time.” The mole confirms that he had been a communist sympathizer for years, which makes the whole idea that he went so long undetected seem unlikely. The novel ends with a whimper not a bang. The mole is quietly killed, offstage. Smiley re-retires. The end.

Le Carre is best at the small spyycraft: the woman tailing a suspect who changes her clothes often to avoid detection but doesn’t have time to change her shoes, two full milk-bottles left in front of the door signaling the house is safe. As with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the stakes are very low. Although a lot of folks get killed and state-secrets get passed, it’s only spies crossing and double-crossing themselves in the middle of a cold-war stalemate. The Circus doesn’t feel essential it feels bureaucratic, staffed by middle-managers, not heroes. Maybe that’s how the English like it. It’s weak tea, for me.