The Looking Glass War
£2.98
Painfully brilliant - spoiler alert - A group of people run an office whose reason for existence has disappeared, but they carry on as usual, eating biscuits and doing the Times crossword. Then they get the idea they ll run an operation just like they used to in the old days. This gets the OK from head office - good, because occasionally it crosses their minds that head office might like to close them down. They recruit a man from the East who settled here during the war and used to be in their employ and find some reason for sending him over to the Other Side to get some information. They persuade him to do one last job for them over dinner in a terrible restaurant on a ring road decorated with fake Mediterranean tat. They spend a lot of time training him and really enjoy themselves for a change. Head office helps them equip him with an old, out of date radio set and off he goes. He lasts about two days before he is blown (and blown apart). The man from head office turns up and says Well, time for you chaps to shut up shop. In total denial, they begin talking about the need for a new photocopier - it ll really streamline their workload. Truly Kafkaesque.
Not quite there yet - This is one of the early novels of John Le Carre. You can recognise some elements, which again turn up in his later success novels. Nevertheless, as a whole I found this book a bit boring. The group of secret service officials cover the operation in a very laid back gentlemanly manner, which I didn t find very credible. It almost reads like `one of these things one does at the club . The other thing which bothered me is that the preparation and run-up to the operation fills 80% of the book, whilst the actual operation appears to be just a minor point in the story. Given the title I would have expected it to play a larger part in the book.
Don t miss this one - This is not perhaps the best-known Le Carre book, but it s my favourite and I recommend it to anyone who hasn t yet discovered it. It has elements in common with Tinker Tailor in that it deals with collective delusion by a group of secret service officials - here, a bunch of second-rate spymasters who decide to run an unauthorised operation. Le Carre has a great gift for portraying vanity and the terrifying lengths people will go to in order to make themselves feel important.
Not your average spy story - A bleak, unusual and compelling thriller. Fans of le Carre will know not to expect car chases and glamour, but this novel also has little of the complexity, puzzle-solving and intrigue of his better known spy stories.The plot is fairly simple: a small and out-of-favour military intelligence department in London have a potentially huge discovery on their hands - an unconfirmed and sketchy report of Soviet missiles being stored in East Germany (the period is Cold War, early sixties). In a bid to confirm the discovery - and regain some of their former status and credibility - the department decides to find and train an agent to go over the border, something they have not done for many years.The majority of the book is taken up with the preparation and training for the mission and the shifting politics and loyalties of those involved. This provides a strange mix of convincing technical detail and le Carre s always excellent character sketches and observations on a certain type of English character.Without giving too much away of the story, the heart of the book is a study of ambition, resentment, jealousies and fading glories in the intelligence community during this period. The outcome of the mission is almost secondary, but the reader can discern the likely outcome as le Carre carefully reveals the endless possibilities of small details and judgements that can mean the difference between success and failure in this environment.In conclusion, not your average spy story, not typical le Carre, but still engrossing and worth a read.
A realistic jaunt into espionage - Le Carre is famed for his realism, when compared to many other espionage writers. This book followed his huge success with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and was not well received critically. Le Carre felt that this book was the most realistic of all of his novels and he is right. Nothing that you read here is fanciful or contrived, but as a result the novel lacks an edge that le Carre normally would provide. This novel is by no means a bad one, it is maybe a little too realistic and thus missed out on providing the escapism that most people read espionage thrillers for.