Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Stein, Benjamin
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" There are few cocoons so warm as a good spy story. You can crawl inside the twists and turns, the code names, the treachery and heroics; and the real world, with its real treachery and heroics, its...
...It is Smiley's task to go over the files of the last few years at the Circus and, by sheer analytical ability, to figure out who is the Soviet agent, the "mole," as he is called...
...He did not come down one inch with The Looking Glass War, though he began to get bogged down a little bit in the banality-of-evil theory with A Small Town in Germany...
...With the backstabbing and intrigue, and with never knowing where you can be safe, come other, more pleasurable feelings...
...The action, elicited through the narrative of the ousted agents and the reading of the files, moves on at a rapid and fluid pace...
...John Le Carre started his writing career with plain old murder mysteries, the very first of which were of the same caliber as the best murder mysteries of the finest masters...
...Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality had some spy story content, but basically they lacked the paraphernalia and trappings of the spy story...
...And of course, there is seduction and loveless love as a cover for espionage diversions...
...But when he hit the pace of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Le Curd leapt to the pinnacle of spy story writers...
...Control had died and George Smiley lives on iit a kind of half life, living well off his pension but tormented by his wife's infidelities and his brain's turning fallow...
...It is like the fantasy of the most narcissistic child come true—you are perpetually on stage,with a constant audience...
...In its essence, the Circus, the whole intelligence fraternity in fact, is shown, on both sides, as a kind of club...
...But with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Le Carre is back in the groove, putting thereader by the fireside and away from the cares of this world, with a highly cerebral but terse and exciting story of bureaucratic intrigue underlain with a cold war intelligence catastrophe...
...Smiley must work in dread secrecy, hiding the very fact of his investigations from whoever might be the mole...
...For despite all that danger and risk, there is a huge benefit: If you are really in with the in crowd, someone is watching you night and day...
...The need for belonging, for being a part of something extremely precious, is satisfied upon reading the first few pages of the book...
...Gradually, as he goes through files with such names as "Operation Witchcraft," "Source Merlin," "Operation Testify," he stumbles onto an enormous and frightening fact...
...He is brought in to clear up a problem which had been discoveredafter the cleanup: namely that a spy placed inside the Circus many years before by the opposition, Moscow Centre, had now risen to be one of the top four people in the Circus, and was causing every single major operation to be "blown...
...To read Le Carre's latest is not only to enjoy literature, but to enjoy an experience of rare pleasure, the warmth of the inner sanctum of the imaginary world of spies...
...To be in the realm of the spy story is the most delicious kind of escape—the kind that has some socially redeeming value, so that it makes the reader think he has not only enjoyed himself, but bettered himself in the reading...
...Early in the novel we are told that the old crew who had been running things, Control (his real name is never given) and his right-hand man, George Smiley, have been replaced...
...You are couched within a secret society of your own, living within the larger society, butnot bound by its rules...
...But other, more complex needs are gratified as the story winds on...
...As with his last several stories, Le Carry's latest concerns the innermost workings of the British intelligence establishment, euphemistically called The Circus...
...True, there is the threat of sudden death, but that just shows that you are not only lovely to look at, but someone important, someone worth killing...
...Moscow Centre, through ingenious use of the mole, has turned the Circus inside out, has been using it as essentially one of its own arms, and has utterly destroyed its capacity to collect any useful data on Soviet or satellite operations...
...There had been a series of continuing espionage disasters, and the Government had brought in new brooms to sweep things clean...
...But it is in the atmosphere that Le Carre has performed most brilliantly...
...They were, however, incredibly clever stories, told with grace...
...The plot is complex, although nowhere nearly as intricate as some of Le Carre's earlier works...
...It lulls you and simultaneously taunts you to try to figure it out...
...In brief, the really excellent spy story makes the reader feel as if he is a child, with a child's fulfilled fantasy...
...There is cross and double cross, perfidy which is shrouded in the mists of college days, and youthful left-wing romanticism...
...He must supplement the knowledge contained in the files, which a reliable agent spirits to him, by interviews with other men and women forced out of the Circus when he was...
...And since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has that level of quality, it offers that level of escape—plus a healthy dash of cerebration in trying to outguess Le Carre...
...and the real world, with its real treachery and heroics, its code words, its memo writing and reading, its dusting and lawn mowing, is shut out entirely...
...There is even friend allowing his best friend to be shot and tortured...
...But not for long...
...He has succeeded in distilling the essence of what makes a spy story so enjoyable...
...It is like belonging to the best college fraternity ever dreamt of...
...Once you are in, you are part of an elite which knows things no one else is privileged to know, which can do things other people only dream of...
...THERE ARE FEw cocoons so warm as a good spy story...
...The really top-flight spy adventure amuses and teases at the same time...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
