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Books and the Arts: 'Smiley's People'

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John le Carré, who appears to know everything about modern espionage that there is to know, faces the problem in his spy fiction of giving a generally favorable account of British Intelligence in the very era of … spectacular betrayals and defections. And he must do this, if we are to take him at all seriously, without undue indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasy and razzle-dazzle effects. It is an interesting problem and tension in the work of a writer whose readiness with razzle-dazzle has earned him a large popular audience and yet whose novels seem seriously to try to tell the truth about his time. Is he a serious novelist, or a mere entertainer, or something in between? Here is le Carré's new novel, Smiley's People, to help determine that question.

Smiley's People completes a massive trilogy begun in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and continued in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). It pits George Smiley … against a nameless antagonist (code name "Karla") high in KGB officialdom at "Moscow Centre," in a battle that is not to the death but to defection. (p. 31)

The trilogy as a whole enacts an exemplary tale of English tortoise and Russian hare…. In Smiley's People George pretty well makes all the running, as the English would say, when by learning of certain skeletons in Karla's family closet, he is able to pressure his opponent actually to defect in propria persona. It took a long time but, as the Spanish say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

The concluding scene of Smiley's People shows Karla crossing alone from East to West Berlin under the gaze of George and several of his agents…. We know that Smiley has ruined many lives, some innocent, in his tenacious pursuit of Karla; that he once sent a sadistic young killer to eliminate one of his own favorite agents whose disobedience threatened the success of an operation in progress; that many more people will die as the result of Karla's "debriefing" by tough professional "inquisitors"; and we just don't believe that the dirty tricks of one side are OK because they were ordered up by a decent little English guy with a disarming name.

In short, the book is mostly entertainment, quite good entertainment, the sort of read a half-pay KGB colonel like Philby might enjoy in his Moscow retirement, to get through the long, dull Russian winter. (p. 32)

Julian Moynahan, "Books and the Arts: 'Smiley's People'," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1980 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 182, No. 3, January 19, 1980, pp. 31-2.

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