Word: london
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There in a colorless London house lives George Smiley, Master Spy (ret.). Resolutely out of style, fat as the Michelin tire man, he has long been cuckolded by his wife and betrayed by close associates. It is tune the old cold warrior hung up his spites. Not Smiley. Once more, Author John le Carré trots him out in a flawed and misnamed adventure: Smiley's People is actually about the people's Smiley. All of his endearing characteristics, so well catalogued in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, are herein amplified. Now heading toward...
...anxious to bury both the victim and his story. Ordinarily, the ultimate company man might agree. But behind homicide Smiley detects the ruthless spirit of Karla, his longtime adversary in Moscow. Publicly accepting the injunction of superiors, Smiley decides to do a little freelance investigation. On the scent from London to Germany he encounters a brilliant cast of characters from previous enterprises: Connie, the sapphic Soviet expert whom the Circus has dubbed Mother Russia; Oliver Lacon, the icy intelligence chief whose marital distress parallels Smiley's; the estranged Ann, still Mrs. Smi ley, and still destructive; and, ultimately, Karla...
From the airless corridors of London to the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Smiley battles Karla as masters play chess by mail, visualizing the opponent, pondering alternatives, waiting agonizing days for the next move. And herein lie the novel's aggravating weaknesses. Readers have been here long, long ago. Smiley, the cerebral sleuth, may be as corpulent as Nero Wolfe, but in this adventure he is suddenly Sherlock Holmes redivivus. His obsessive enemy is a new version of Dr. Moriarty. The audience is Watson, condemned to wonder what the detective is up to when he examines those cigarettes...
...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...
Daydreaming about the death of a spouse is a punishable offense in the world of this novel, particularly when the dreamer has a girlfriend with limitless funds and a small portfolio of scruples. When Clare does indeed die violently, Strickland and the London police seem curiously unwilling to suspect the one person who had most to gain from the murder...