The Looking Glass War (original 1965; edition 2010)

Most spy thrillers are junk food; this is a gourmet meal. Le Carré is a masterful writer who doesn't waste a word. His story is a tragedy spiced with bitter satire and a dash of farce. The action takes place in the early 1960s in Finland, London, and East Germany. Le Carré's George Smiley makes a few appearances, but the protagonists are mainly from a rival British agency determined to remain relevant. Most of the fellows used to trick Nazis in their youth. Now they've decided to try some tricks on the East Germans.

The spies' world is old and worn, coal-heated, still stocked with snapshots of The War. But now everything is in the throes of renovation into something breathlessly modern and urgent, as befits a conflict that has the potential to destroy the world.

This is the fourth novel by John Le Carré I have read in the space of that many months, and it is starting to look like I might have embarked on a (more or less) chronological reading of his whole oeuvre. Chances do seem good that I will continue as The Looking Glass War is the novel I liked best so far, even better than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I suspect I will likely be in a minority with this assessment, though, because this is a very strange novel indeed and quite far removed from what one would expect a spy thriller to be – most of its protagonists aren’t even real spies and those that are, are mostly distinguished by their incompetence. Also it has to be said that the novel is not particularly thrilling – tension does rise somewhat towards the end, but overall it is not a page turner but rather a novel that requires the reader’s attention. The basic plot itself is fairly simple, and – thanks to a generous scattering of clues – it becomes clear quite early on where things are going and that they won’t be ending well. However, the ways by which The Looking Glass War actually gets there are not at all predictable, but unexpectedly thorny and twisting. The novel never really does what one would expect it to do, its attention and emphasis ricochet all over the place, it jumps from one irrelevant detail to the next, it shifts points of view erratically, gets distracted by apparently pointless observations, and generally seems doggedly determined to do everything a well-constructed novel, not to mention a supposed thriller, should not be doing. And yet, through all those irritations and omissions, through all the frustrated reader expectations and randomly scattered lacunae, Le Carré somehow still manages to tell a compelling, if extremely bleak, story.

What The Looking Glass War most reminded me of was Jazz music. Now, comparing literature to Jazz has been an old hat ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that does not mean it doesn’t fit occasionally, and this seems to me to be one of those cases. It is not the language – that is Le Carré’s nuanced, highly literary style that readers are familiar with from previous novels, long descriptive periods that bear no trace of the speed and nervosity generally associated with Jazz music. But there is something quite literally offbeat about The Looking Glass War, the way it takes a traditional, well-known theme and proceeds to take it apart, breaks it down into its constituent parts and then puts them together again in an entirely new way, leaving things out we always thought were necessary but now find out aren’t and adding free, sometimes wild improvisations that drive the worn-out theme into entirely unexpected directions. I’m inclined to think it no accident that The Looking Glass War was published in the same year John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was released (1965), and only four years after Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. In its wilful dismissal and gleeful breaking of all rules of “good” novel-writing I found it also a bit reminiscent of Godard’s À bout de souffle, making it very much a product of the period it was written and published in.

However that might be, The Looking Glass War is a highly intriguing read and quite probably unlike any other spy novel you’ve read, and I’m very keen on finding out where Le Carré went from there.

While the reader is obviously meant to find Leclerc and his department delusional, self-opinionated and inept, making them the focus of the book doesn’t, to my mind, lead to an engaging read. Smiley’s few appearances are full of promise but only embryonic. Twists at the end weren’t that unexpected either. ( )

John Le Carre follows up The Spy Who Came In from the Cold with this more realistic take on the mundane, and inane, world of cold war espionage. The brief sparks of idealism occasionally present in the previous book is replaced here by an almost pervading cynicism as rival intelligence agencies compete for resources, with the fading military intelligence operation, the Department, snatching at the flimsiest of leads in an effort to prove their relevance compared to the political intelligence agency, the Circus. In doing so, lies are believed to the point where they become indistinguishable from truth, careers are made or broken, assets, including men, are wasted.

This is where the more modern Le Carre began to take shape, introducing a brand of skepticism that can only be wrought by a former insider. At the time of its publication in 1965 it was excoriated by critics and did not sell nearly as well as its predecessor, not surprisingly since it was not in the mode of the rah-rah spy novels in vogue at the time. Sadly, as evidenced by the dysfunction revealed in the 9/11 investigations, clumsy, uncoordinated intelligence agencies incapable of working together still rule the world with disastrous consequences. The writing is less polished, but here lies the germ of the style that would become Le Carre's hallmark in the Quest for Karla trilogy. ( )

The Looking Glass War is the fourth George Smiley book by John le Carré. Where the previous book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was about career spies, this is a more bittersweet tale about former military spies, trying to recapture to their former glory. The blurb on the back of my book says it's "a devastating and tragic record of human, not glamour, spies", and I think that's a very good description.

Again, Smiley is hardly the focus of the book. He appears more than he did in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and again one gets the idea that he (and Control) are playing puppet master with the characters in this book. But slightly bewildered puppet masters, as the military spies, led by Leclerc, jealously hide their machinations from the Circus and dig themselves in deeper.

It's another excellent book in this series, and I'm looking forward to reading on. ( )