Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

His previous book, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, an attempt to break out of spy fiction, had received a critical pounding: one critic pronounced the book ‘a disastrous failure’, another, ‘the product of self-indulgence and intellectual laziness’. When he began it, his career was in crisis. The more I discovered about the circumstances in which the novel was written, the more I came to admire his achievement. And indeed researching le Carré’s life has enhanced my appreciation of his work, and of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in particular. I must confess that I hadn’t noticed this until I came to write le Carré’s biography. ‘Life’s such a puzzle to you, isn’t it?’ – a line which is absolutely true to the characters, and to the spirit of the book, but which derives from Arthur Hopcraft’s script, not from le Carré’s novel.

‘Poor George,’ Smiley’s wife says to him at the end. In fact it is a surprise not to find certain familiar lines in the book on rereading, and to realize that they derive from the television series. The script echoes the novel – almost literally, in the sense that much of the dialogue is lifted unchanged from the book, though the story is told in chronological sequence, rather than as a succession of flashbacks.

Just as I have read and reread the book, I have watched this adaptation several times over, with the effect that many of the lines have become imprinted on my mind. Here is a writer in complete command of his subject: able to do whatever he wants, confident it will succeed.įor me, and I expect for most readers old enough to remember it, the book has become enmeshed with the BBC adaptation, first broadcast in 1979, in which Alec Guinness played the lead role of George Smiley.

There is so much about it to admire and enjoy: the precision of the dialogue, the deftly drawn characters, the accuracy of the settings, the steadily rising tension – above all, the sheer quality of the writing. It is one of those books that never fails to give me pleasure, even now I know it so well. I first read John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy soon after it was published in 1974, and have reread it several times since.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré