Book Review: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

 

 

© 1963 by John Le Carre

 

This novel was a bucket list accomplishment for me, and, to be honest, an act of courage.

 

My mother-in-law, well-read in the genres of mystery, espionage, and New York Times best-seller lists, is a huge Le Carré fan and has been recommending him to me right from day one, almost thirty years ago. I knew Le Carré as an intellectual master builder of intricate plots, shadowy characterizations, and don’t-look-behind-the-curtain all-is-not-as-it-seems scenarios. Cat-and-mouse who-can-you-trust and who-can’t-you-trust. Twists and turns, third act revelations that will drop the jaw agape in wonder. A parsimonious writer who only deals out to the reader clues that seem senseless to what is shown unfolding. A storyteller who crafts a tale backwards but tells it in a deceptively straightforward way.

 

In lieu of all this, I was intimidated.

 

Sometime fifteen or twenty years ago I decided that the water’d be fine to jump right in. And being Hopper with an overly large ego and inflated sense of comprehension, I started with Le Carré’s masterpiece: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And immediately got lost fifty or sixty pages in. Could be life with a newborn in a new house; could be the surgeries I had around that time. Or it could be I was just not ready for it. I put it away, sold it to a used book store, and vowed I would return at some later point in life; hence, the bucket list.

 

My mother-in-law sent me some money for my birthday back in September and this rekindled the interest. I decided to start off where the Internet pretty much unanimously tells Le Carré newbies to start off with – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I fearfully kept it on my shelf until, quite on a whim and after three exhausting literary false-starts, read in in a week in mid-December.

 

My daughter’s kitten Sweet Potato stretching out with my 

copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

If I were to encapsulate the plot in a short paragraph, it’d be something like this: world-weary MI-6 intelligence officer Alec Leamas, fresh off losing a double-agent escaping at the checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, is recruited for one last mission – one last strike against the red menace before being allowed to “come in from the cold.” He’s to play a defector, be picked up and brought into East Germany, where he would lay the groundwork to eliminate London’s nemesis, a brutal genius named Mundt. Leamas plans to do this by lies and suggestions in his debriefing. But things escalate and swerve out of control, as things like these tend to do, and however cautious our hero is, mistakes are made – or are they? Not everything is as it seems, and third act revelations abound, culminating in a finale Mundt-like and brutal in its concision.

 

I was able to follow the novel, the allegiances, and the surprises, and enjoyed it immensely. That weekend I went to a local library and found a 1990 Le Carré book, The Secret Pilgrim, on sale for a dollar. But Le Carre is meant to be read in some kind of order, if only to stay as spoiler-free as possible as the author references earlier plots in later books. So I was planning to buy some prequels to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with any Christmas money. But the Mrs. beat me to it and wrapped Le Carré’s first and second novels, A Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) and placed them under the tree. I’m currently reading a SF paperback (my last from my pre-holiday haul a few weeks ago), and will crack Call for the Dead come January.

 

And after that, George Smiley, in Le Carré’s masterpiece, the “Karla” trilogy:

   Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

   The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

   Smiley’s People (1979)

 

“Grade” for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – A-plus. Probably the best first-time fiction I read this year.