Title: Tinker Tailor
Review: The first in Le Carre's Smiley trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not a spy novel. It is a novel that has spies in it. The prose is contemplative and subtle, the characters frightfully english a la Cambridge in the thirties. They are mostly older now, and what we see running throughout the book is disappointment. The heady years of world war II are over, the cold war is in full swing and we discover that more than one of the idols of that heroic time have feet decidedly made of clay. This is a bona fide work of literature - the themes are universal and touchingly revealed, the writing clever and contemplative and the verisimilitude of the world of Smiley and his shadowy confederates convincingly drawn. A delightful surprise for those who have been dismissing Le Carre through years of seeing him in airport bookshops.
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