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? 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. With less action per se than The Honourable Schoolboy, this novel was not without its generous share of tension. The interactions and dialogue were the highlights of this book, and the spotlight on George Smiley himself was the main attraction. Smiley is a man that I warmed to almost immediately with my first ever introduction to him in Call for the Dead and he has been growing on me ever since. In fact, I would say that I have grown to esteem the man quite highly. He is someone I would like to have standing by my side in my darkest days. Even more than before, the reader is able to worm his or her way into Smiley’s psyche and truly understand the workings of his conscience. We recognize the harsh demands that the moral complexities of the intelligence world place on a man after so many years in the field.

This was stunning - quite possibly a perfect novel. It would almost be an insult to describe it as a great example of its genre, for le Carre is such a splendid writer that he elevates his tales of espionage to the level of true literature. While other of his works exhibit the slight flaw (in the case of Tinker, Tailor it was more than slight) of an overly-complex plot, here le Carre keeps things just simple enough that the reader can keep up without too much difficulty. The "tradecraft" is still here, and indeed has rarely been more exhilarating, but the result of this more straightforward narrative is that the reader can engage more fully with the beauty of the writing. There is imagery here that is so lucid that as a reader you cannot help but share it with the person nearest you (in my case, it was my girlfriend). The psychological torments of George Smiley are described in such bitter detail that my stomach churned, my mind fraught with the possibility that things could still go horribly wrong.

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We are all Smiley's people, a kind of secular god of intelligence' New Yorker Read more Look Inside Details

So how will events play out in the final volume? Given le Carré's preference for harsh realities to sugar coated endings, it's best not to anticipate, but just go along for the tension-filled ride. Of course, with Smiley that tension more often takes the form of a chess match than a horse race, but it is no less thrilling for that. In 1983 Smiley's People won four BAFTA awards, including Best Actor (for Alec Guinness) and Best Actress (for Beryl Reid), and was nominated for six others. The series also won a Peabody Award. In 2010, The Guardian ranked the series at number 17 in their list of "The Top 50 TV Dramas of All Time". [7] Commercial releases [ edit ]Directed by Swedish film-maker Tomas Alfredson of Let the Right One In fame, and starring Oldman, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy and Ciaran Hinds, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens in the US on 9 December. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw awarded the film five stars and called it "a skin-crawlingly atmospheric, uncompromisingly cerebral and austere account of John le Carré's cold war espionage novel".