Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
by John le Carré
Summary
Retired intelligence officer George Smiley is quietly brought back into service to root out a Soviet double agent, code named Gerald, who has burrowed deep into the senior ranks of British intelligence. Le Carre replaces the glamour of conventional spy fiction with a meticulous, morally exhausted portrait of Cold War espionage as a grinding bureaucratic and psychological grind rather than an adventure. The novel is widely considered one of the finest spy novels ever written and cemented Smiley as one of fiction's great unglamorous investigators.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1974 Booker Prize was shared that year between Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton's Holiday, two literary novels far from le Carre's genre. Le Carre's spy fiction won wide critical respect over his career but never claimed Britain's top literary prize.