Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterpiece, 5 Aug 2005
This is probably the finest of Le Carre's novels. His great creation, George Smiley, is repsonsible for finding a Soviet mole in the heirarchy of British Intelligence which has done immeasureable damage for decades. George is the most unlikely hero - ponderous, old, shy, retiring, but posessed of enormous compassion and iron will. This who-dunnit story plays against a general background of betrayal - the betrayal of the mole against the British state, the betrayal of the agents run by the mole, the betrayal of Smiley's wife's infidelity, the general betrayal of idealism in the Circus to the mundane self-serving ends of its leaders. And then there is the setting - Britain in all its drab, mundane 1960's/70's glory. Drab colours, poor food, rain soaked days, steamed up car windows, snobbery and poverty. And the dialogue is second to none. So world weary, so wise. And the intelligence world rings true in this book too, it feels realistic, it feels about right. The moral ambiguity is embraced by Le Carre. Though there are heroes and villians in this book, the boundaries are fairly blurred.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Secret service turned inside out & back again.., 8 April 2003
Reading this book fills you with melancholy about the good old days of the Cold War. Le Carre writes convincly about a stumbling British civil (albeit secret) service, including the ubiquitous pompous character(s). The plot, the characters the setting, the workings of the service are all very convincing. It is great to see a desperate service fall into a trap & come out of it again.More than a spy novel, it is a joy to read, because of its wording and its weary thoughts of some of its main characters. Also, no shoot-outs, no rockets, no submarines or deadly secret weapons: just a giant puzzle being slowly unraffled. Absolute masterpiece, utterly convincing through the human, all too human characters, their ambitions, their weaknesses.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best spy thriller ever written, 21 Feb 2001
I have never enjoyed a book so much. Robert Ludlum comes close with his Bourne trilogy but this book takes the spying game to even greater heights of gritty reality. Every page keeps the reader guessing where the story will go next, making you feel a part of the plot. Enticingly written, giving the reader an almost unreal closeness to the main character George Smiley, I would recomend this book to anybody who has even the slightest inkling to know how it is to live and breath as a man with two or even three different lives.
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by John le Carré
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