George Smiley is at once an unlikely hero of spy fiction and, to borrow le Carré’s epithet for a later creation, a perfect spy. A veteran of the intelligence operations of World War II and living in retirement, he is podgy, unobtrusive and unremarkable in appearance, and deferential and self-effacing in manner until called to action. When called from the uncomfortable lassitude of his retirement, he changes little externally but glows with an inner and inexhaustible intensity, whether in his research into the personal and professional histories in the Circus files, in his disbanding and reestablishing of the Circus, or in his tireless quest of personal and national revenge upon Karla, the Thirteenth Directorate, and Moscow Centre. Through it all, a deep and abiding melancholy for a failed marriage and a failed fellowship of the Circus’ Round Table colors even his most determined and single-minded efforts.

His opponent, Karla, is never quite realistically drawn, even in Smiley’s remembrances of their first meeting in the 1950’s, when Smiley offered the unknown Russian captured in India a chance to defect to the West. Indeed, like Control, Karla is known only by his work name, the name of his unit in the Spanish Civil War. He assumes, in the course of the novels, the mythic proportions of a latter-day Professor Moriarty. His one weakness, a trait he shares with Smiley, is his love or affection for one other human being. In Smiley’s case, it is his impossible wife, Ann; in Karla’s, it is his impossible daughter. Like Smiley, Karla cannot give up the last illusion of an illusionless man.

Le Carré’s multitudinous supporting characters range in importance from those with strong cameo appearances to those with notable continuing performances. The minor players, such as the fatuously self-important Whitehall minion, Roddy Martindale, the conspiratorially servile Mikhel of the Free Baltic Library, and the “schoolboy,” Jerry Westerby (the subject of the second novel of the Karla trilogy), serve to ground the novels in a public, plausible, and faintly familiar ordinary world. The major characters also dwell in the familiar realities of daily life and serve to ground the novels in the intensely personal and inward worlds of thought and emotion. Jim Priddeaux, for example, is the focus of a major portion of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, both in segments of the narrative that deal with his present occupations at Thursgood’s and in those that stem from and circle back to Operation Testify. In the course of the novel, the major developments in his life are revealed, from his early friendship with Haydon and his recruitment at Oxford, through his capture and imprisonment in Czechoslovakia, to his bitter present as a language teacher, his expert stalking of Smiley, and his vengeful murder of Haydon at Sarratt.

Others of the supporting cast—such as Peter Guillam, Smiley’s cup-bearer; the ubiquitous Fawn, Smiley’s factotum who fetches tea, biscuits, and files but who is, by trade, a silent killer; Oliver Lacon of Whitehall and Ascot, a smug and self-serving bureaucrat but still an ally of the Circus; and Toby Esterhase, the master of surveillance—reflect differing levels of reality in the shadowy world of government and espionage and, as finely drawn characters, suggest an entire world in which they and others actually exist. Connie Sachs, the retired “Moscow-gazer,” appears in both novels as the incongruous oracle to whom the middle-aged knight-errant of the Cold War, George Smiley, must resort to get his bearings. It is she who, in the first instance, successfully identifies Polyakov as the logical choice for “Source Merlin” and, in Smiley’s People, identifies Ostrakova’s recruiter, Kirov, as...