Smiley's People (Karla Trilogy, Book 3) (original 1979; edition 2010)

Describing le Carré’s Smiley novels as being in the spy genre is rather misleading as it’s too narrow. While the spy element nicely drives the plot, I think the main interest lies in the characterisation, something le Carré is able to develop because of the measured pace. Of course, getting the balance right here is quite a challenge and sometimes I felt this novel faltered a little but, by and large, the author gets it pretty much just right.

The troubled and defeated Smiley is of course the most interesting character, someone who has not only lost his wife to her innumerable affairs but also lost her to his best friend as a result of being outsmarted by Karla, his main opponent in his life as a spy. In other words his defeat is amplified, with neither the professional nor personal life able to offer any refuge but rather to magnify the extent of his loss. Despite this or even because of it, the reader readily becomes attached to George, not that le Carré ever calls him this, I noticed. He’s always Smiley with the author carefully keeping him likeable but avoiding the sentimental attachment which would come with the use of his first name although he has other characters, of course, addressing him as George, often with respect and affection, thereby leading the reader’s opinion of him. ‘Smiley’ as a surname was no doubt equally carefully chosen having nuances of someone positive even though this character rarely (if ever?) smiles. That Smiley perseveres and cares so much for his rejected émigrés in this novel also makes him the one we side with, the real culprits being not so much the assassinating Soviets but the lapdogs who’ve taken over from Smiley. In Chapter 20 le Carré actually sums up the complexity of his protagonist as ‘hunter, recluse, lover, solitary man in search of completion, shrewd player of the Great Game, avenger, doubter in search of reassurance – Smiley was by turns each one of them, and sometimes more than one’.

While Saul Enderby may be a bit of a caricature, we’re still very much given someone we can recognise, the career professional interested in his own advancement and therefore not rocking the boat. His callous treatment of Sam Collins is amusing, openly telling him he’s fawning and then telling him to offer Smiley a drink instead of offering it directly himself – ‘Sam, ask him what h wants to drink’ thereby insulting with his arrogance both Smiley and Sam.

What is also appealing is the breadth of the focus. When he has Smiley think about the modern Hamburg compared with the pre-bombed ‘rich and graceful shipping town’, he could be thinking about any modern city ‘hurtling into the anonymity of canned music, high-rise concrete and smoked glass’. It’s this sort of observation of contemporary life that makes le Carré’s novels go beyond their genre. Added to that le Carré doesn’t dumb things down for the reader. It’s true at one stage towards the end he has Enderby sum up the situation as a form of recap for the reader but, apart from using a wide range of vocabulary (including words like ‘imprest’ which you don’t see often), he introduces phrases which quite a few readers (including myself) didn’t know like ‘flucht nach vorn’ with an interesting explanation afterwards.

All in all, then, I think this novel works on a number of levels which put together, hold the reader’s interest. ( )

The easiest to follow of the trilogy, and the most elegiac in tone. I enjoyed it, and it was a fitting end. ( )

The conclusion to the Karla Trilogy (preceded by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [1974] and The Honourable Schoolboy [1977]; all three books were collected in an omnibus as The Quest for Karla in 1982), Smiley's People is the swan song of the unassuming "fat spy" George Smiley -- a retired highly-placed official of the "Circus" (MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service) -- who is reluctantly taken out of mothballs by the sneering and supercilious Circus administrators (Oliver Lacon and Lauder Strickland) when a high-ranking Soviet defector is found murdered in Hampstead Heath, London. As Smiley is able to persuade his former superiors that the defector was murdered by agents of the head of "Moscow Centre's" (the KGB's) super-secretive Thirteenth Directorate known only as "Karla" -- essentially Smiley's opposite number among the Russians -- they grudgingly give him the funds and space to run a counter-operation in the hopes of capturing, or, at minimum, definitively removing Karla.

I found Smiley's People the weakest book of the trilogy. While it starts out promisingly (if somewhat bewilderingly) enough -- the point of view soon shifts to Smiley in his spartan, bachelor existence (his aristocratic and promiscuous wife, Ann, who played a pivotal role in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has left, but not divorced him) and holds on him for much of the book -- a late, blessedly temporary, shift to the POV of a young woman nearly sank the narrative for me; clearly, whatever le Carre's strengths as a writer are, writing from the POV of a young woman is not one of them. The story is saved by resuming its focus on Smiley, but the authorial misstep is severe enough and late enough in the book to leave an indelible, and unwelcome, impression.

As with the previous books, most of the action is off-screen, although, as with the trilogy's predecessors, that doesn't keep Smiley's People from being gripping and suspenseful if one is not utterly addicted to conventional action thriller antics. I especially enjoyed the meeting between Smiley and his former bosses, and their apologias for and grousings about the current British administration (a leftist one [given the timeframe of the events herein, Britain had a Labour government led by James Callaghan, and was likely operating under the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977] with little use for the Cold War status quo of the foreign intelligence service, although not one so unrealistic as to totally disenfranchise or defund it), and the sophistry they (chiefly Lacon; in Chapter 4, le Carré observes, "In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste but direct answers were worse"; p. 49) employ to put daylight between themselves and personal responsibility for giving Smiley his head to work a possible coup against the Soviets; as with the late, lamented British TV series The Sandbaggers and its stepchild, Greg Rucka's Queen & Country series of comic books and novels, and indeed in Len Deighton's three trilogies starring Bernard Samson (the Game, Set and Match, Hook, Line and Sinker, and Faith, Hope and Charity trilogies), le Carré posits a covert universe where the greatest dangers are from one's own side, and the hardest fought and most significant battles play out in the dispiriting and featureless rooms where one meets with one's own superiors. Such a mindset and presentation are clearly not for every taste; but for those who are of a similar bent or who are persuadable, le Carré offers a rich, layered, and deep (and deeply fraught) narrative where the personal and the political are inextricably (and surprisingly) entwined, where one is never sure of the ground beneath, ahead, or behind him, and where one is never quite certain that the game was, or is, worth the candle.

Also in keeping with the previous volumes, le Carré salts Smiley's People with neat turns of phrase, passages of poetry (Rupert Brooke; W.H. Auden), and sly nods to genre antecedents -- one of Smiley's cover identities is Standfast (a nod to the title of an espionage-cum-adventure novel by John Buchan, the third novel featuring Richard Hannay, Mr Standfast; of course, Buchan took his title from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress); glancing references are dropped to The Secret Sharer (Chapter 12, p. 151), the title of a novella by Joseph Conrad, whose novels The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes may be regarded as prototypes of the modern espionage novel (indeed, Conrad was an influence on both Graham Greene and le Carré) and Army of Shadows (Chapter 6, p. 73), an excellent 1969 movie about the French resistance to the Nazi occupation written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, based on the autobiographical 1943 novel by Joseph Kessel -- and other little "Easter eggs" (another of Smiley's cover identities is Barraclough, which could reference either Geoffrey Barraclough, a British historian whose specialties were medieval and German history [Smiley is a German philologist; le Carré notes, in Chapter 12, that "German was Smiley's second language, and sometimes his first"; p. 155], or Roy Barraclough, a comic actor best known for playing a "shifty, lugubrious landlord" on Coronation Street; Smiley was laboring on a monograph on the baroque poet Martin Opitz when the events of the novel were set in motion [Chapter 2; pps. 25-6], and reads a volume of Adam Olearius when he goes out to dinner, the better to isolate himself from the importuning of acquaintances [p. 33]).

But, underlying these rather sterile enjoyments are the not inconsiderable human touches: some key supporting characters from the previous books make welcome return engagements, chiefly Russian specialist Connie Sachs (who was apparently very loosely based on Milicent Bagot) and Toby Esterhase (who nearly steals the show every time he opens his mouth here); while George's big meeting with his estranged wife is bleakly poignant in a classically understated British way (Ann tells him, "'I'm a comedian, George....I need a straight man. I need you.'"; Chapter 20, p. 295). It's also easily as gripping as the dialogues more directly dealing with the novel's multiple interlocking plots.

Though there is internal evidence that Smiley's People takes place in 1978 (as, for example, on p. 187 [Chapter 14]), a mere year prior to its date of publication, it has the feeling of a historical novel not entirely due to the fact that I read it over three decades after it was first published, given the "new brooms" that the "Lib-Lab" government are taking to their intelligence services, and the role that revolutionaries (some of them White Russian, or tsarist) exiled from the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain countries -- revolutionaries disregarded and sidelined by both the Circus and "the Cousins" (i.e., the CIA) -- play in the plot. Lacon et al make it abundantly clear to Smiley that they consider all of the skulduggery surrounding the "quest for Karla" old, if not actually irrelevant, business; it would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the situations depicted in Smiley's People as a mere entertainment, with no relevance to our present times. ( )

Thie is is the followup to Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy and it was equally good. I liked the construct of Le Carre' world and what conniving sobs. What fun and a great ending. ( )

How does an average, normal reader even begin to critique (review) the work of le Carré? The Karla Trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Honorable Schoolboy: Smiley’s People) is a series that I have had to reread on almost an annual basis since first discovering George Smiley in ”Call for the Dead” (http://www.librarything.com/work/4815) in the 1960’s. I have even “enticed and corrupted” both my sons, one an Art Professor, the other a Diplomat, in my addiction and they too own and reread the books and have copies of the BBC series to watch. I shamelessly refuse to apologize for my enticement of them, or even perhaps, you the reader of this presumptuous review of such a masterwork.

They are, after all, only fiction, just a series of ‘novels’? (Which are generally considered essentially trivial – an idea against which even Jane Austen’s own strictures have had no effect). But so addictive is John le Carré’s skill that even a vast general TV viewing public became so engrossed in a serialized BBC’s series of one of his works that they brought the British nation to a standstill for each of the hour-long adaptions that were broadcast.

Pure fascinating reading that evokes both characters and atmospheres so strongly they engage the reader and entice them to continue to read each and every one of his works. A craftsmanship based on real experience – in the British Secret Service – that adds such value to his inventions that they become a reality. The TV adaptation featured Sir Alec Guinness as the main character, George Smiley, dour, donnish master spy and charismatic leader. His portrayal was masterly, and therein lay a poisonous problem … after the trilogy became both best-selling books, serialized television, and films; the author ‘killed off’ (like Conan Doyle with Holmes, and Nicolas Freeling with Van der Valk) both the George Smiley, the circus, and all future Smiley’s people by totally dropping him from his repertoire and changing his subjects to further and even more modern fields. In an interview the author explained his motivation for disappointing and stunning his loyal readership…

”… the problem was ,whether I liked it or not by the time (Sir) Alec Guinness finished with him he was George Smiley – voice, mannerisms, looks - and by the time he had finished with my character I had been given back used goods. On the other hand, I didn't at all enjoy the fact that Smiley had somehow been taken over by my public…”

Do read this wonderful series … but your appreciation and enjoyment might also become as embittered as the rest of us disappointed fans at the disappearance of these fascinating characters and the intellectual twists of John le Carré’s Smiley’s people in their Cold War circus.

(This review is my attempt for the whole of the "Karla" series.)