Sunday Evening Reads- Smiley's People

Right, I'm sorry this has gone up on a Monday evening instead of a Sunday, as it should be- truth be told I committed a brilliant bit of idiocy yesterday and, after piling in all the necessary HTML for links and shiz, previewing and re-previewing, I left this review sat as a draft. Then I went to bed, went to work, and came back to realise that far from being published where it could only be seen by the wayward, the confused and the imaginary people that make up my readers, it was in fact buried in the bowels of Blogspot, where it could never be seen by anyone. So sorry about that, senior moments get at even the most youthful 21-year-olds. Here you go.

This week we're I'm looking at the third in John Le Carré's Karla trilogy, Smiley's People.

Following last week's discovery of the minimalist, similar-to-sketching style with which Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms it's revealing to return to Le Carre's portrayal of the eponymous Smiley, written in a similarly muted manner. The novel itself airs on the descriptive and possesses a certain flair, too much so to be compared to Hemingway, but the key to Smiley's People, as is true of both the prequels to it, is the way in which Smiley is written. You have to read him as though you are in the room with him, each little tic, gesture or look that Smiley gives, or the absence of them and the stillness of the passive listener, has to be taken on board. He doesn't speak to say what he wants to say most of the time. It is read by the other characters by observing him. And it is blinding, the amount that goes on under the surface of Smiley's slight furrowed brow and rotund, unassuming figure.

Set-up forms about seventy per cent of the story, the good news being that you don't have to have read the other two books worth of back story (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, if your were wondering) to get your teeth into this. It's a sprawling, undulating plot, covering decades of Cold War and post-WWII intelligence tension across Russia, Germany, Britain and France, flitting back and forth between ex-spies, current spies and ex-assets deftly and slickly. At some points the plot can feel a little too much like a whirlpool, with you as the reader at the centre of it, but then the slow burn revelations peppered throughout the story offer up another slight change of direction, and you're dragged back in.

To attempt to describe much of the plot here would cheat you out of letting it unfold for you, with the occasional prompted raised eyebrows and constant whir of second-guessing that it brings. Suffice to say that intelligence is passed, or not passed, between the Circus and a third party they rehabilitated into London, attacks begin on seemingly unrelated and completely separately located normal people and an information drop is made on a boat in Eastern Europe. From there, threads and sinews begin to stretch towards The Circus, and the identity of a dead man becomes key in halting or at least discovering something, though they are not sure what. And that's how bewildered you'll be for at least the first half, but only through forming opinions on what is happening and then reasserting them again and again, trusting no one and no information Le Carré deems to give you, to the point where you can see why Smiley mutes himself and tries merely to absorb what happens around him until he knows anything at all.

Smiley, brilliantly, never feels tired to the reader. Clearly, he is tired, beleaguered and wearied by The Circus and the years he has spent turning people on each other and their countries, but to the reader he doesn't feel like a flagging or overrun character. This is pretty good, given that he is older now and more jaded with emptiness than ever, and the beginning of his involvement comes as an old-man, ex-professional coming out of retirement for one last job trope. Le Carré's deftness with the plot, the various Russians, non-Russians, killers, informants and taxi drivers of the late seventies intelligence world put paid to that trait, however, and despite comments to the effect that Smiley's age is making him slip up over time, it never feels like a tacked on story.

As endings go, this is not a race to the finish for the series. It boils and simmers, checks, rechecks and plans its last act brilliantly, racking up the tension in a final battle of wits, political and Circus-based pawns between the two old spy masters Smiley and Karla, and wraps up incredibly neatly. Which isn't something I like in books, often, but that is because it is pretty much always too neat, clearly manufactured, whereas the showdown of defections and continuing/ burnt assets that begins to form is fitting, not forced. Not suitable for those whose spy showdowns feature guns, shouting, sex and quips.