Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -John le Carré

There are no gadgets, no girls; nothing of the sorts that one sees in the Mission Impossible series. But that is a movie series. This book, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the first book of the Karla trilogy is surprisingly stunning.

Warning: reader shouldn’t jump on this one expecting it to be like one of the James Bourne books. It isn’t.

To say in short: there is the British Intelligence which is called the Circus. It is suspected that there is a mole in the Circus. Apparently this mole has been in the Circus for decades and is someone who is part of the topmost executives. To find this mole, George Smiley is recruited, who himself was flushed out of the Circus.

George Smiley was a protagonist who came by as the guy who is calm and collected in the beginning. Surprisingly the reader might find himself attracted to him. Smiley is quite intelligent. Though he may not be like James Bond, he is even better than the former in spying.

This book provides a humane touch to espionage. Rather than saying a ‘humane touch’, it would be better to say that ‘this is how it might be actually’. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré was himself once part of the British secret service. It would be right to say that he has some experience of the espionage world. It is also said that the story was inspired by John’s experiences in the MI6 after the 1950s when five traitors were exposed as KGB moles.

There is a lot of spy jargon. Sometimes it is also hard to keep track of them. That is just a minor issue. There are also quite a few characters, which are sometimes hard to remember. The novel isn’t an edge of the seat thriller. It is nothing like that. It is quite realistic in fact. Thus, it is a path-breaker novel.

All of John’s novels might actually provide the same authenticity and this one might not actually be the first one to do so. But the lack of sensationalism in this novel is actually unsettling sometimes. That is truly brilliant. The novel might not be engaging but it is not one bit boring. It is said that books, movies; all forms of art are fundamentally pleasing when they are found to be ‘interesting’. Anything other than ‘interesting’ would be ‘opinion’.

This book is more interesting than it seems. It is more slowly paced than one imagines. The commentary is also complex. It takes some time to figure things out. When reading a suspense book like one of Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s, the reader often finds himself investigating the characters while reading. Sometimes the reader even figures out the culprit. Well in this one, the reader gets to be a spy. The life of a spy might not be what the reader imagines. But still the reader becomes a spy and tries his hand on spying the spies. The reader will find by the end that finding the culprit isn’t much engaging but to execute things from thereon is.

It is truly a different experience to read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is one John le Carré best work. Normally, in a series of books, what happens is that the reader has to read the rest of the books in the series to know the end. In this case, the book doesn’t give a closure. But due to its realistic nature, it isn’t supposed to. To say, one can comfortably finish this book and choose not to read the rest. But the rest of them look promising too.

Ps: there is no hard and fast rule that the movie shouldn’t be watched before reading the movie. The 2011 adaptation of the book lives up to its name and is quite amazing.