I think the first and last books of the trilogy (and it’s very loosely a trilogy at all) are the better books and stories here, in that order. I was sad to have finished it, but heartened by one of my favorite characters, George Smiley. And as is fitting for a protagonist such as Smiley, the detective work constantly zooms inward to the personal and psychological as often as it does outward to the global and strategic. These books are just as much detective novels as they are works of espionage. Other characters are fully explored and more than adequately provide the admittedly necessary excitement and impulsiveness lacking in Smiley.
But it's his meticulous mind and pristine tradecraft that drive the plot. He is aging, portly, and borderline antisocial. Take the lead character, George Smiley: he is everything Bond and Borne is not. But I would just as soon find someone boring if they found these books boring. Those expecting either a James Bond or a Jason Borne character to kick down doors or rappel down mountains in a blaze of bullets and explosions will be disappointed with the pace of these books. This distance and opaqueness premiates the series, but allows for a committed reader to be duly and fully rewarded with the crescendos of an ever engulfing plot. an elite that appears to be sullen and watchful compared to the more vigorous and well-funded Cousins (Americans). But once I grew accustomed to the style and the seemingly glitchy way many of the characters speak, I found it served to hold the reader at an appropriate distance such that the utter "foreignness" of the subject matter (espionage) is even more pronounced and shrouded in a mystique reserved for a British elite.
It takes a while to get into Le Carre's sometimes dizzying and thoroughly British prose style - full of terms and phrases only those born and raised in the Kingdom can read in a breezy way.
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