What I Am Reading: "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold" by John le Carré

Lesson number one: trust no one. Minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them.

-Col. Hunter Gathers, Venture Bros.

I didn't get the timing perfectly right, but I decided to end the year the way I began it, with some le Carré. This book was his first big hit, written when he was still an agent (the flyleaf even reads "John le Carré is the pseudonym for a British civil servant employed in one of the Whitehall ministries").

The story is fairly short, and has the same wheels-within-wheels plotting that characterizes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This book is in a way a mirror image of that one, as it involves an effort to eliminate an East German intelligence chief, Mundt, by making it appear that he is a British agent. This plot unspools in a fairly easy to understand way throughout the novel, as the main character establishes proper cover to pose as a double-agent and travels to meet his handlers; but the plot throws in multiple twists at the end, as things come to head in a Soviet courtroom. The book concludes in a lesson on the amorality of tradecraft (I am choosing, for whatever reason, not to spoil the plot of this 56-year old book).

This is, to my understanding, vintage le Carré of the period, writing to take the romance and any high-mindedness out of spy fiction. Set in Germany in the '60s as it is, the book also contains echos of the Holocaust, and the lack of proper de-Nazification that characterized both halves of Germany and that is exacerbated by the novel’s characters. Just some feel-good reading.

I also read this book so that I could properly read the next one, A Legacy of Spies, le Carré's second-most-recent novel (I am impressed by how he still manages to crank them out). That one is the latest (and I have to assume the last) to present George Smiley as a character, just as he is presented as a minor character in this book. I am told that Legacy revisits and investigates both this book and Tinker Tailor; so though this book was on my list anyway, I also wanted to lay the proper groundwork for my next read. It will be interesting to see how 2017 le Carré judges his characters of decades previous, including his pet George Smiley. His original texts condemn them enough, implicitly and explicitly, that I wonder what new judgement can be rendered. It should provide some exciting historiography, if nothing else.