Smiley's People

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For this trilogy summary, I am going to borrow some Paulingo (Paul’s lingo): It’s the bottom of the 9th and the score is 0 – 0. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is on second base and The Honourable Schoolboy is on first. Along comes Smiley's People and John Le Carré hits it out of the ballpark and brings them all home in a 3 – 0 win for the good guys! While Smiley had several offers of university places, she chose the all-female Vassar in 1967. "I loved college," she says. "When I arrived Vassar was what it had always been; full of girls in beautiful clothes from north New York preparing to get married to members of the ruling class. But within a year it had been transformed." The change was mostly driven by the opening up of the men's colleges, neighbouring Yale in particular, through a new testing system. George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. When a Russian émigré is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, Smiley is called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past. What follows is Smiley the human being at his most vulnerable and Smiley the case officer at his most brilliant; and it takes to a thrilling conclusion his career-long, serpentine battle with the enigmatic and ruthless Russian spymaster Karla... Starring the award-winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Anna Chancellor, Lindsay Duncan, Maggie Steed, Alex Jennings and Kenneth Cranham, this enthralling dramatisation captures every nuance of le Carré’s complex and compelling novel - the final book in John le Carré’s Karla trilogy. ‘a radio triumph... Simon Russell Beale’s pitch-perfect master spy’ - Financial Times. Read more Details Alec Guinness was just under six feet, a moderately large man with an accumulating gut in 1979 (he was in his middle sixties when “Tinker Tailor” was shot). Guinness had been one of the great stalwarts of British film acting in the forties, fifties, and sixties—David Lean’s favorite man, a genial yet commanding presence in such easy, whimsical comedies as “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “The Man in the White Suit,” and “The Lavender Hill Mob.” He was not the actor you would most likely think of to play a hero, though George Lucas, knowing that he had enormous gravity to draw on, had cast him as the light saber-wielding, wisdom-dispensing Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars.”

The concluding part of le Carré's celebrated Karla Trilogy, Smiley's People sees the last confrontation between the indefatigable spymaster and his great enemy, as their rivalry comes to a shattering end. Fiction: Barn Blind 1980; At Paradise Gate 1981; Duplicate Keys 1984; The Age of Grief 1987; The Greenlanders 1988; Ordinary Love and Good Will 1989; A Thousand Acres 1991; Moo 1995; The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton 1998; Horse Heaven 2000; Good Faith 2003. This story is remarkable as the plot is both intricate and meticulous while at the same time filled with intrigue and fascinating characters who carry it forward. This was a truly memorable story and although I would love to write more, it would be impossible without spoilers. Smiley's People, originally published in 1979, is the third and final novel of John le Carré's Karla trilogy, following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. It sees an older Smiley called out of retirement for the last time to investigate the death of one of his old agents, a former Soviet general who was also the titular head of an Estonian émigré organisation based in London. The book's dramatic denouement sees the spy confronting his nemesis, the Soviet spy-master Karla.

On of the plus sides of almost never watching movies anymore is that the ones I do find myself actually watching probably are more impressive to me than they would be if I were watching a lot of films. Unlike many of my goodreads.com friends, I can't talk intelligently about movies, there are things I like and things I don't like and even though I have somewhat pretentious, or snobbish, or highbrow tastes I can do little to articulate why I like a movie. Part of it is that movies don't inspire my thoughts like books do, another is that I don't think I really get or like the principle language of film. The more literary directors, like Bergman I could probably talk about but it would be using the language of books to say what I like or how I think the film works. That is what I'm enjoying about The Age of the Medici the way that Rossellini is moving the story and ideas along not by action but by words. The film is visually interesting with the lavish depiction of Renaissance Florence, but the narrative moves like a cross between the party goers of James Joyce's "The Dead" and the espionage novels of John Le Carre.

Smiley is only a side character in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the story of an embittered double agent sent to infiltrate East German intelligence, but you should start here anyway, because this book is so freaking good and also because it’s the clearest and most direct articulation of the questions that animate le Carré’s work — stuff like What if Western democracy is a self-deceivingly immoral enterprise, devoid of values and rotting from the inside? What if communism … isn’t? What if spying is, instead of sexy and fun and heroic, awful and degrading and really bad for your liver? That a book that can engagingly ask those kinds of bad-dinner-party questions and be as gripping and unforgettable as The Spy Who is a testament to le Carré’s mastery of plot and pacing. This is hard to do as a writer. Because writers are often not that smart, even when they're talented. Le Carré writes as though he's smarter than all his readers, and when I read him I'm convinced. The thrills in these books come not from action sequences, but from the plausibility of the dialogue: I was more on edge during Smiley's calm ‘interrogation’ of Toby Esterhase here than I've been in any number of car chase or bomb-defusion scenes. What to say next? How to press them in exactly the right way, without scaring them off? Career: Professor, Iowa State University 1981-96; visiting professor, University of Iowa 1981, '87. Chabon says it is an aspect of her work he particularly admires. "Writers have a tendency to squelch these sorts of impulses because they get punished for it by critics and even by readers who like to read the same thing over and over again. But her nature as a writer is to write in different modes and styles and genres and she has done a great job of it." Nakadate agrees that "she has taken risks with her readership", but also stresses that there are themes that run throughout Smiley's work. "There's always a food scene and there's always a horse scene," he laughs. "But more importantly she's always interested in gender." When they made love, he knew he was the surrogate for all the men who hadn't rung. ... "To be beautiful and Ann is one thing," she had said to him not long ago; "to be beautiful and Ann's age will soon be another." And to be ugly and mine is another again, he thought furiously.

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In a TV analogy the espionage world of Le Carre in the Smiley novels (of which, I should have mentioned earlier, this is the conclusion to a trilogy) is like "The Wire" or, sort of, "Homicide", as opposed to any of the hour long police procedurals with their fast resolution and instant results (and I guess that makes Smiley sort of a fat, short, white Lester). The slow meticulous unfolding and the little details in both the shows mentioned and the Smiley novels might seem a little labored at points but their end payoff is greater than the 44 minute resolution of "CSI" or say a James Bond film. It's been interesting to see how le Carré's style had altered with each subsequent book. Smiley's People was somewhat akin to a police procedural as Smiley followed his crumb trail of clues. But unlike police detectives and as an old-hand at espionage, Smiley faced dangers that were far more personal in nature. Compared with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there was less of the cerebral puzzle aspect and more acerbic wit (which delighted me in Agent Running in the Field, my first le Carré novel). There were no hot military action scenes reminiscent of The Honourable Schoolboy but nonetheless death made its presence known in Smiley's People. One hallmark of le Carré's books is a bittersweet flavor, because nothing in life, especially in the dirty milieu of espionage, is free.