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Comment by atulatul | Hacker News Reader

I read a few of his novels and watched a couple of series, movies based on those. For me, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy... with Alec Guinness was the best of these.

But one thing I noticed and liked is how dull the novels are. Not much happens.

Till then I had read/watched Bond and similar fiction. And John le Carré was different. The complexity, uncertainty, deliberation, etc. was far better IMO than Bond's action and cigarettes.

It was like watching Morse after Jack Bauer. And while saying one is better than the other is probably a matter of taste ("Bond lit his 70th cigarette of the day"), I liked le Carré more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy_(min...

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I remember finishing The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (age 19 or so) and thinking that a) I absolutely loved it and b) nothing happened in it. It seemed like the entire novel was hints and suggestions and beaurocracy and yet somehow it was absolutely riveting.

A few days ago I started watching the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor and my wife commented on basically the same thing. Where other spy novels/shows are "bondian" and glamorous Le Carré is shabby and beaurocratic and magically more compelling.

And an amazing Richard Burton in the movie, which I found excellent

That was my point. Magically compelling even though not much happens there.

I haven't seen Richard Burton's movie, but the book 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' was engaging.

The movie is very, very good too. Richard Burton is outstanding in it, and his laughter is unmistakable. Too bad we barely get any Smiley at all, and what little there is, is totally forgettable.

Have you watched "A most wanted man". It's a really good film, and even less happens in it than, Tinkor Tailor Soldier Spy. Not that nothing happens, it's just at the end you normally expect there to be a conclusion, but it feel very much like just the beginning of something.

I haven't. But will try to locate it. Thanks.

The book is fantastic. I was completely gutted at the end.

Even the recent film adaptation of Tinker Tailor was good with a stellar cast.

Of his novels I liked 'The Honourable Schoolboy' the best, its great complexity, its descriptions of the byzantine bureaucracy of Britain and the moral ambiguity of it all, which is missing from most of genre fiction.

His novels were "literary" spy novels. A major loss.

> But one thing I noticed and liked is how dull the novels are. Not much happens.

Oh but it does. It just happens in the tilt of a person's head.

I once travelled in South America for 6 months with only TTSS for company. Never got sick of re-reading it.

He was a phenomenally economical and powerful writer. I've literally pored over individual sentences in his books trying to pull apart how he did so much with so little.

Some of the books are gripping without much happening, but some of his books are just shit. I feel like I’ve rarely come across an author who’s able to combine such great books (Spy who came in from the cold) with such dross (Looking glass war).

I didn’t know that because I’ve only read good stuff from him (The spy who came in from the cold and Smiley’s People) and found it sublime, but this seems to be an occurrence with prolific artists. I feel the same about Woody Allen...

I'm curious: what did you dislike about The Looking Glass War?

Let me start by noting that my opinion of this book isn’t particularly novel: «The book received a mixed-to-negative critical response, which le Carré credits to readers being upset that the book presented blatantly incompetent and largely unsympathetic characters. Writing in 2013, le Carré said that his "readers hated me for it"»

It’s a book about a bunch of idiots bungling stuff. Perhaps if I was in the IC or had come of age during the dusk of the empire I’d get its alleged biting satire, but otherwise it’s just very slow moving, without compelling characters or a particularly interesting or intelligent plot.

(Spoilers obviously)

I didn't enjoy reading The Looking Glass War, but it stuck with me in a big way.

A lot of the other novels are about intricate chess games, where you spend the time waiting for the other shoe to drop that clicks everything in to place.

TLGW continues with the format, but the other shoe just never drops. There's no payoff. The novel ends. That's a shit thing to read, and I'll never reread it.

But it makes the rest of the novels more bleak and sinister. You get the feeling that while the author is focusing on the Smileys and Karlas of the world and the games they play, TLGW is what happens when normal people take the reins without interference - and that's the norm. It's the author pulling away the veneer of glamor around the world of spying that he's intricately built up.

That's just my interpretation, though. It could just be a shit novel.

(spoilers)

That's basically my reading of it too. Almost everyone is incompetent or deluded, there are no heroes, and in the end Leiser is simply abandoned for reasons that are basically squalid and dishonourable. That this end happens fairly abruptly and we never discover his fate presumably reflects the reality of espionage.

According to Wikipedia [1], le Carre said that he wrote the book to satirise the idea of spying as a romantic endeavour, and British nostalgia for ww2. He also said that he regarded it as one of his most authentic works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War

It’s basically the fucking fly episode in breaking bad

Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil gives a fairly detailed account of what it's like to be an intelligence officer (in his case for the CIA) - you are basically identifying people who have useful information and then persuading them to do that, by whatever means necessary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)

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