Trilogy Review, The Karla Trilogy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley´s People

By John le Carré

I thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit and try something new, that´s why I intend to not just review one book, but a whole trilogy in one fell swoop. I’ll write a little bit about the author and the individual parts of the trilogy before I move on to explaining why I think that the trilogy in question deserves to be on your reading list. There will probably be some minor spoilers but I’ll try my best to make sure that readers whose interests are piqued can still pick up Tinker, Tailor and enjoy it like le Carré intended.

John le Carré (that´s his pen name, his real name is David Cornwell) was born in Dorset, England in 1931. After graduating from Oxford he started working for British intelligence, at a time when the Cold War was threatening to become hot. He wrote his first novel, The spy who came in from the cold, in 1963 while still working for MI6, hence the need for a pen name. After the successful publication of his first novel he left the service and became a full time writer.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy

The first installment in the Smiley trilogy went up on the silver screen in 2011, Directed by the brilliant Tomas Alfredson, and featured an all-star cast of Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch among others. Many people complained that the film was too slow paced, yours truly remains adamant that they should have slowed down a bit and made it at least an hour longer. The film is one of my favorites, and the book it´s based on was an instant classic that turned the espionage genre on its head.

The plot is set in the rain soaked London of the early seventies. Master spy George Smiley has been let go from the “Circus”, Le Carré´s synonym for British intelligence, after his long time mentor, a man known as Control, has passed away. Smiley is soon called back from retirement, however, when a British agent is contacted by a soviet defector with a shocking revelation. A soviet mole has penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence, it´s someone who has been there for years and it´s likely that Smiley knows the mole personally. This devious double agent has been planted there by Smiley´s nemesis, the mysterious Karla, head of Soviet intelligence´s Thirteenth Directorate. Working under the radar with a small but dedicated cadre, it falls to Smiley to uncover the identity of the mole and redeem his old mentor.  

Tinker, Tailor is in my opinion an absolute literary delight. It´s possibly one of the most riveting spy stories ever written, even though you have to stay on your toes to be able to follow all the twists and turns in the plot.  

The Honorable Schoolboy

After having exposed the mole within the British Secret Service, George Smiley is placed in charge of a gravely compromised Circus. Due to spending cuts they can barely afford to keep the kettle turned on. Yet when Moscow is planning something big in war torn Southeast Asia, Smiley dispatches the failed spy and man perennially looking for his big break, Gerald Westerby, to pose as a journalist and expose whatever devilry Karla is up too. While Westerby is dodging shells in the jungle, Smiley grapples with his colleagues in U.S intelligence and plans a joint operation together with his overseas colleagues.

The Honorable Schoolboy is a compelling novel of daunting scope and complexity. True to his tradition, le Carré doesn´t lend the reader a helping hand, which might have been useful for understanding all the nuances of the plot. Alfredson and the film team intends to skip this one and proceed directly to Smiley’s People. Even though it´s a great novel, the narrative may be a bit sprawling at times and it´s certainly the leased focused of the three.          

Smiley´s People

When a washed up old spy is found dead in the middle of London, George Smiley is once more called out of retirement. A seemingly million to one shot, uncovered by an old war hero written off by the Circus ages ago, might just be the ticket to a final showdown with Carla. Like Michael Bloomberg pondering a 2016 presidential bid, the lure is irresistible for Smiley to throw all the chips onto the table in the autumn of his life and battle it out one last time with his old nemesis.

The conclusion of the Smiley trilogy is riveting and spellbinding. It might just be the best book of the three, if only because you can always feel how high the stakes are personally for Smiley as he draws ever nearer to a final reckoning with Karla. Gathering his old colleagues for an espionage operation that everyone knows beforehand will go down in Circus lore, Smiley embarks on the last and greatest undertaking of his life.      

Le Carré´s words and world

Ian Fleming served in British intelligence during world war two, perhaps the last time in modern history when there was such a thing as a “good” war. John le Carré joined the service during the Cold War, when the line between friend and foe was blurred and everyone looked anxiously over their shoulders. The former lived in a time of heroes and villains, the latter in a brown and beige postwar England where there was still rationing well into the nineteen fifties. I previously reviewed Trigger Mortis on this blog, and the difference between Le Carré and Fleming is so vast as to be almost laughable. They both manage (or managed in regards to Fleming) to bring great suspense and memorable characters to life, but they do so in starkly different ways. James bond is the suave, good looking ladies’ man who shoots Russians in the face and drives exotic sports cars. George Smiley is none of the above. A balding and diminutive old man who polishes his spectacles on the fat end of his tie and never raises his voice above a whisper, his enemies are of a different breed entirely than a megalomaniacal villain living in a volcano. One of the central tenets of Le Carré´s stories is that the spy trade is a morally ambiguous one. Just because someone was born on the wrong side of the iron curtain doesn´t mean that they are bad people, and vice versa. Smiley even muses privately that, had he not been born in England, he might have become something very similar to Karla. 

The pipe smoke, the wallpaper, the corduroy trousers, everything in George Smileys world is either brown or grey. There is a palpable yet hard to define sense of danger and unease that permeates every page. Set during a time when the British Empire was dissolving and her Majesty´s government no longer wielded the power in once did, the embattled Circus is always short on funds and the golden days during the war when everything was black and white are long gone. The decline of the west is in full swing and for Smiley, his own home is just as threatening an environment as the world of international intrigue. His wife Ann only features sporadically, and her incessant philandering is always there in the back of Smiley´s head, as is the knowledge that he will never be able to work up the courage to leave her. In the end he might not even want to, despite all they have been through. Smiley is the last of a dying breed, and his colleagues as well as himself knows this.

Le Carré is a master in the art of delivering great suspense through small means. The reader is fed tales of international intrigue one tiny teaspoon at a time, and will have to read between the lines to fully understand what is going on. Even though I have just praised the Smiley trilogy, I would paradoxically recommend you to not start reading Tinker, Tailor just yet. Le Carré´s debut, The spy who came in from the cold, is much more accessible and straight forward, as well as a classic in its own right. Start with his first novel and you can´t go far wrong. If you find it to your liking you will definitely love the rest of his works. His most recent novel however, A delicate truth, is unfortunately not that great, and represents a sad blip on his otherwise impressive resumé.