What do you think?
Rate this book
397 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 1979
Our future was with the collective, but our survival was with the individual, and the paradox was killing us every day.
It's loving the living which is sometimes a bit of a problem.
When they made love, he knew he was the surrogate for all the men who hadn't rung. ... "To be beautiful and Ann is one thing," she had said to him not long ago; "to be beautiful and Ann's age will soon be another." And to be ugly and mine is another again, he thought furiously.
All his professional life ... he had been the witness, or victim -- or even reluctant prophet -- of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now ... integration. ... Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator. He had forborne, hoping others would forbear, and they had not.
But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public service.
... it was just possible, against all the odds, that he had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all.
He realized he had no real name by which to address his enemy: only a code-name, and a woman's at that.
He read as far into his own past as into Karla’s, and sometimes it seemed to him that the one life was merely the complement to the other; that they were causes of the same incurable malady.
We have crossed each other's frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land.
”For all these reasons then, ‘Smiley’s People’ was intended to be a requiem for the old spy, and to me that is what it remains. . . . The grand finale takes place in divided Berlin. . . . For his last act, Smiley would return there, and in his heart beg Karla not to leave the East. Smiley wins, Karla loses. But at what cost to both of them? Facing each other, they are the two no-men of no-man’s land. Karla has sacrificed his political faith, Smiley his humanity.”
On Karla had descended the curse of Smiley's compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla's fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frontiers, we are the no-men of no-man's-land.My first comment on this - the third part of the provisional 'Karla trilogy' - is the utter and beautiful restraint of le Carré: not so much in the writing which is detailed and precise, but in the depths of what is not said. Le Carré shows complete confidence in his readers to read skilfully and with intuitive feeling and so doesn't spell out the emotional substance that comprises this story.