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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: October 01, 2002
Publishing house: Scribner
Sale Popularity Level: 20261
Studio: Scribner
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
John le Carré's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service Agent George Smiley -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.
A modern masterpiece, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley's chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet equivalent, as he's assigned to identify and destroy the double agent -- a mole -- who has burrowed his way into the top echelons of British Intelligence Headquarters.
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Rated by buyers 
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The real genius of Le Carre's novel is its pacing and form, with each page unfolding one more layer of a complex and compelling story. Both an intellectual and (somewhat) psychological thriller, the novel does not conform to almost any modern standards of the spy genre, preferring George Smiley's patient study and analysis to slowly and eloquently present a masterful deception within the Circus (British Intelligence). Le Carre's characters are excellent as well: Smiley's shy and arrogant brilliance, Peter Guilliam's dashing lack of versatility, Connie Sachs' (a particularly delightful invention by Le Carre) vitality...and all live under the shadows of legends like Control and, of course, Karla. It is a world that is entirely believable and yet satisfies all the complexities the imagination demands from spy stories. And on top of it all, Le Carre is a genuinely good writer. Another reviewer lamented the somber tone of the book, saying it causes one to feel that every sky is dark gray and the rain is always just about to fall. This is hardly a fault, however, but instead it provides a perfect backdrop to the grim proceedings of searching for a mole in Her Majesty's Secret Service. Le Carre loves the search itself, and no one brings it to life quite like he does.
Rated by buyers -
Not a quick read, nor should it be. Stay with it slowly. The book has a lot to offer. A classic by any means and one that should not be missed by those who enjoy mysteries.
Rated by buyers 
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The strongest feature of this novel is the beautifully created atmosphere of psychological fog that pervades everything. You can't trust no one, you can't really know if any information is true or false or only an incomplete version of truth .... The whole novel serves as a sort of philosophical reflection on loyalty and trust in human interactions. The spy world, with its experts in deception, is a metaphor for the fact that man is such a complex creature that no one really knows another person in its entirety.
This is a British spy story but it is not a James Bond kind of a story. There are no car chases or gadgets. Our "super spy", George Smiley, is a 50 something short guy who is somewhat over weight and wear thick glasses. Unlike Bond, Smiley is not a ladies man. In fact, he is faithfully married to a beautiful unfaithful woman. Smiley's main talent is rational analysis of information and perceptiveness. The premise of story is that there is a "rotten apple" in the highest level of British intelligence That is, a high ranking member of British intelligence who is betraying his country and Smiley's job is to find him. Betrayal of all kinds, whether real or imagined, is the central obsession of the characters who populate this spy world.
The major weakness of the novel is its unnecessary complexity. For instance, the novel evolves in non-linear fashion in time. There are flash backs in time on a constant basis. One extreme instance, we had few paragraphs of past, a paragraph in present time then back to past and then back again to present and then back to past and once again to present in less than 10 pages of a 350 page novel! A relatively minor character (a Russian cultural attache who is "running'" the mole) is refered to by 4 names (his real name, a fake "cover name" for his British assignment, another fake cover name for his junior colleagues in Russian intelligence and, lastly but not least, a nickname, Poly, assigned to him by British intelligence).
There is a BBC mini-series based on the novel which is far easier to follow. You might be better off watching that than trying to decipher the novel. This might be one of the rare instances, where the adaptation exceeds the original novel.
Rated by buyers 
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TINKER, TAYLOR, SOLDIER, SPY
This one of le Carre's best stories, quite dark but very well written. The times it describes (the 70s) are history of a different age, when Europeans in particular lived under what seemed a very real nuclear threat from the Soviets and their satellite countries. One is left with a sense of thankfulness that terrorists are pretty much the only threat we need worry about today.
Rated by buyers -
I can't remember why I decided to try Le Carre at last, having known about him for many moons. I do recall reading Amazon reviews that spoke of his writing spy novels in response to Ian Fleming, trying to show how complicated and even dreary espionage work actually was, versus the kiss kiss bang bang of the Bond novels. But if that was the impetus for Le Carre's getting started and which fueled novels like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (which I read after this), it's an imperfect account for this extremely twisty and complicated affair.
The unusual fact is that most of the murky darkness the reader muddles through in this novel is directly connected to the narrative method: Le Carre's actual backwards-forwards, multi-framed method of story-telling. Simple bold subheads providing places and dates of certain episodes--Czechoslovakia, 1968--would clear up much of the confusion, but Le Carre intentionally does not provide such signposts. Instead the reader has to slog through given episodes, trying to figure out who's telling a story, when and where it is set, and what bearing it has on the whole. The net effect is headspinning, and obviously, off-putting for many readers. I think the novel is fascinating and ultimately rewarding, but that doesn't mean I didn't have doubts before the scales--almost imperceptibly--finally begin to tilt towards coherence around the middle of the book, and all the bits and pieces at last start to form a meaningful picture.
The story involves the suspicion amongst certain members of Britain's Secret Service--called The Circus in Le Carre's novels--that the Soviets have infiltrated the service with a "mole," a spy who has been buried within the ranks for years, maybe decades. (Sidenote: Le Carre's short preface explains how the novel popularized the term, but that the term has apparently been around in just this sense since Elizabethan times.) Not able to trust any of the current Circus leadership, a London minister recalls George Smiley, former counter-intelligence director for the Circus, to "spy upon the spies." Smiley has recently lost his job, in a sort of forced retirement, following a particularly ugly and embarrassing busted mission to Czechoslovakia in which the Circus' agent, one Jim Prideaux, was severely wounded and captured. Smiley's new mission to detect the mole will cause him to re-examine this failed mission in particular, to learn just why and how it went so wrong. He soon learns that Control, the now-deceased former head of the Circus, had been hot on the trail of the mole himself.
As the picture gets clearer, the story gets intensely exciting. But it takes a good while before the reader can even understand what has gone before, or work out the relationships between the Circus personnel and their departments. I suppose it would have been helpful to have read earlier Le Carre novels before reading this one, since they would have made me familiar with Smiley, Control, and other personalities and concepts. Also, I've been watching the BBC adaptation of this novel lately, and it's amazing how its beginning with the pre-story--the mission to Czechoslovakia--clears up a lot of the mess for the viewer. But I'm convinced that Le Carre's narrative muddle is purposeful, that he wants to challenge the idea that spy fiction is meant to be suspense fiction or escapist fiction at all. The novel's muddle is, after all, no more incomprehensible than similar muddles in Joyce or Faulkner, and that says a lot, I think: Le Carre is making spy fiction into a literary experience here. The emphasis of this puzzle mystery is not so much on the puzzle, clearly defined, as on the feeling or experience of solving a puzzle--particularly, one that matters crucially, one that means life or death. The reader has to feel the darkness getting lighter, to feel the lifting of that oppressive sense of ignorance and doubt. This novel tends to unnerve rather than entertain you, and in that way it's rather ingenius.
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