For some of us, this bleak and witty thriller was an introduction to grownup reality. Who gained from the complex role-playing? The double agents, the planted insinuations, and the endless treacheries? What was won? After reading le Carré, you may think that the struggle against Communism is still necessary, but only a fool would think of it as anything but sordid. The book reproduced the East–West conflict as a set of obscure, fascinating, and dubious strategies. The plot depends on a series of reversals-as you read, you have to revise your understanding of what’s going on, which is part of the fun-but, in the end, all mysteries solved, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” seems as schematic as an architect’s drawing. By this, his third book, he had found his great theme, betrayal, which he has dramatized with infinite variation ever since. The author, born David Cornwell, wrote it at the peak of the Cold War, and he made the startling decision to portray the intelligence methods of both Western and Communist countries as vile and morally senseless. John le Carré’s international best-seller is dynamite-fiendishly clever, as Arthur Conan Doyle might have said, and morally alert in a way that puts it way above the usual run of espionage fiction. “The best spy novel of all time.” That’s what Publishers Weekly called “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in 2006, forty-three years after the book’s publication.
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