Tinker Tailor Soldier SpyA George Smiley Novel

A classic of Cold War spy fiction

Don’t be surprised if you need to press pause a few times during your listen to John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – chances are, you’ll need a moment or two to digest the intricacies of the plot and ploy that permeate this classic of Cold War spy fiction. You may even find that you need to rewind a few minutes just to make sure you’ve gotten the names, times and places right. Luckily, Le Carré’s prose is so rich and rewarding, and Michael Jayston’s reading of the text so convincing, that re-listening to a line or two will not be a mere rehashing of information. Tinker Tailor is, in other words, a very literary spy novel.

Plodding, middle-aged George Smiley has been forced into retirement from his lifelong career at “The Circus” (le Carré’s alias for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service), but is brought back in, surreptitiously, to hunt down a believed mole at the very top of the Circus’s elite. Le Carré spins out the complex plot with dozens of finely-wrought threads, expertly moving forward and back in time towards a climax that manages to feel both surprising and inevitable. Read expertly by Jayston, whose knack for dialect is a perfect complement to le Carré’s precise characterizations, Tinker Tailor transcends its generic limitations to become much more than a typical potboiler. It’s not just “Who is the mole?” that the novel asks, but also “What isEngland’s standing in the world at the end of its empire?” and “What does it mean to love one’s country?” and “Why does the line between betrayal and loyalty seem, sometimes, remarkably thin?” It’s a testament to le Carré’s power as a novelist that, come novel’s end, you will be as haunted by these questions as George Smiley is.