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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780743431705
ISBN number: 0743431707
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: March 01, 2002
Publishing house: Scribner
Sale Popularity Level: 89994
Studio: Scribner
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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 unprecedented worldwide acclaim.THE LOOKING GLASS WAROnce upon a time the distinction had been clear: the Circus handled all things political while the Department dealt with matters military. But over the years, power shifted and the Circus elbowed the Department out. Now, suddenly, the Department has a job on its hands. Evidence suggests Soviet missiles are being positioned close to the German border. Vital film is missing and a courier is dead. Lacking active agents, but possessed of an outdated mandate to proceed, the Department has to find an old hand to prove its mettle. Fred Leiser, German-speaking Pole turned Englishman -- once a qualified radio operator, now involved in the motor trade -- must be called back to the colors and sent East....
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Rated by buyers 
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They looked up and the times had changed and in the cold war where the
Soviets were twenty years ahead in spy craft.Bating Britain to bleed them,
the Soviets had their effort to hold against them in the press.
In James Bond British spies are near supermen, in Le Carre they are inept and pitiful.
Rated by buyers 
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"The Looking Glass War," published in 1965, was British spymaster John LeCarre's fourth published novel, coming right after "A Call for the Dead," "A Murder of Quality," and, the big one, "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold." It's thus an early work of the many-times published, now famous Le Carre, but it gives us many themes his work will revisit.
To begin with, it's set, operationally, in the author's German-speaking comfort zone, east of the Berlin wall. It may make the earliest mention of "Belgravia Cockney," an upper-class drawl, favored by the intelligence community, that resembles the lower class's speech; it will reappear in almost every book. It opens with a riveting set piece, and closes with another; the creation of these set pieces is certainly one of Le Carre's great abilities. It shows us some of the author's great spycraft knowledge; his care at weaving complex plots, though this early work's is much thinner than his later ones; his powerful descriptive writing, and ability to envision many interesting characters and give them enjoyable dialogue. It will introduce and reintroduce some of LeCarre's best known characters: George Smiley, Peter Guillam, his lieutenant; even Alec Leamas, who was "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold--" we're told he's dead.
Its plot is set in what will become familiar Le Carre territory. A small British Intelligence agency, whose brief is strictly military matters, suddenly has reason to believe the Russians are placing missiles in East Germany: remember the Cuba missile crisis?
This small agency has been years fighting, and losing, a turf war for power with LeCarre's vaunted circus, the intelligence agency supreme. LeClerq, head of the smaller agency, is no match for the wily Control, nor for his lieutenant Smiley, already introduced in "Call for the Dead," and "Spy Who Came In From The Cold," and destined, as all LeCarre fans know, for an illustrious career.
LeClerc's people have inadequate spycraft, as all frequent LeCarre readers will recognize; they are dependent upon World War II technology. Other men will suffer and die for this agency head's anxiety to aggrandize his agency in its political war with its sister agency. Control and Smiley won't have to do much, either; just withhold a few new toys. So its vintage LeCarre territory: the men in the field are more victimized by fighting Whitehall mandarins than by the enemy. LeClerq will very first send in Taylor, a man who's been in overt services all his life and not prepared for the covert side. He'll then suddenly reactivate and send in the unfortunate Polish refugee Fred Leiser, who worked for the agency during World War II: Leiser is much too old for the mission, and woefully underprepared and under-equipped.
About that title: "looking glass" is English-speak for the American mirror. Remember that immortal Marx Brothers' scene: Groucho and Harpo before the mirror-- or is it plain clear glass?
Rated by buyers 
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As a complete book, "The Looking Glass War" isn't perhaps one of Le Carre's crowning achievements. But in its specific anatomy of the human deterioration, moral depravity and sometimes inhumanness of the cold war it is one of his deepest studies. If "The Spy who came out from the Cold" and "Smiley's People" are symphonies, then this is a tight piece of chamber music. It could have been tighter -- cutting off about a forth of the book would have improved it -- but it offers a hermetic, very troubling experience. It is less about suspense and action and more about relations, morality and compassion. For my part, it is the one book of Le Carre's that remained with me and troubled me the longest. If you liked the more serious aspects of Le Carre's work, then this one will engage you. If you enjoy his work mostly for the action and suspense, however, this one may come on as a little tedious.
Albeit a cameo by Smiley (in one of his least attractive moments), the characters are mostly new. The plot itself is simple: a small, practically defunct British spy agency with a mandate for military targets that has been lagging on aimlessly since WWII, gets one more shot at mounting an intelligence operation. WWII was their best of times, the source of their pride and nostalgia: since then, stripped from financing, backwards on technology, they are no more than a bureaucratic specter. But the gods of warfare reward their zealots, and out of the blue, the agency is offered to retrieve some crucial information about military installations beyond the iron wall (I'll be stingy with details so as not to spoil too much). Everybody wakes up. As they do not have even a single operational agent (nor a radio, weapons, vehicles etc.), they must recruit one, hastily train and employ him; but they need to constantly lie to him, else he might realize how reduced they have become. The relations between the agency's personnel -- the washed-out old hand, the eager young assistant, the ambitious chief -- and the agent, Leiser (codename Mayfly) is what the book is mostly about.
Le Carre, of course, never quite revels to us why Leiser accepts his role (it was mostly a mistake to be heavy-handed about that, as in the subpar "The Night Manager.") Little by little, hints are dropped. A naturalized Pole, dapper, womanizer, Leiser is in fact in desperate need of discipline in his life. An extremely lonely man, the small circle of old-hand spymasters around him supply him with a sense of belonging, friendship, perhaps even love (at a certain point, young Avery realizes that he is being played by his superiors quite as Leiser is. His job is to have Leiser like, possibly love him; and he does.) One of the more pathetic portions of the book is the 48-hours leave that Leiser is granted during his training. While all are certain that this "ladies' man" is having the time of his life, he in fact roams London streets aimlessly, dissipating the time until he can return to the ad-hoc training facility (a house in Oxford rented for one month). What Leiser otherwise wants, is to be thoroughly English. He is insulted to the extent of rage when his colloquialisms are corrected by the jolly but insensitive cockney radio trainer, Johnson. He craves Englishness. It is something I wholly do not understand myself, but Le Carre is effective in convincing us that such a passion exists. It is beyond merely belonging, it is becoming.
So much is Leiser involved in his new life, that his common sense does not reveal to him the amateur nature of the preparations. The radio technology he is expected to use is outdated, cumbersome and easy to intercept; there is no clear plan of action, really, except for getting him in; certainly no one gives serious thought how to get him out. The readers suspect this since a totally mundane assignment that Avery embarked on earlier, which was botched for lack of preparation and professionalism, is praised by his superiors as a success; so utterly afraid of facing their own incompetence they have lost that all-important ability of learning from mistakes.
The Circus, their rival agency where Smiley works, of course realizes this. firmly in the grasp of Control, with Smiley as his lieutenant and sometimes conscience, the Circus observes and keeps its distance (in terms of Le Carre continuity, the story takes place in the mid-sixties, before Smiley's very first retirement). However, neither Control nor Smiley will deny the specter team the rope that they require to hang their own agent when everything, of course --
[SPOILER ALERT BEGINS!] --
goes wrong.
There is one point in the book where all of a sudden things turn serious: as Leiser crosses the border (burdened by an old 50-pound radio unit in a suitcase) he quietly and efficiently kills a sentry with a knife. All of a sudden we realize that, his inadequate training notwithstanding, this is a resourceful, dangerous man. This action, however, turns ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
If you are a le Carre fan, read it. It is a good book, and much better than some spy novels, but not the best of le Carre.
Rated by buyers -
Among other things, the description of running an Agent (Fred Leiser) through the Iron Curtain at night remains one of the best I've seen.
On a larger scale, this is a story of the mounting bureaucratic infighting between a military intelligence operation and the emergent power of the "Circus", Control and George Smiley. Like most good LeCarre novels it is also a story of more primal human emotions and their impact, in this case, on espionage operations. Very much worth the read.
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