![]() ![]() ![]() The truth is that God intends us to read thriller series in odd and disjointed orders as we find individual episodes dog-eared in used-book stores and beach-house rentals, but if I wanted to undertake the worthwhile project of reading through le Carré’s Smiley novels for the first time, this is the order that I’d recommend.ġ. The Smiley books don’t need to be read in chronological order, and, frankly, probably shouldn’t it’s much more rewarding to jump around, skipping the experiments (the second Smiley book is a murder mystery, not a spy book) and lackluster sequels until you’re really hooked. Collectively, they form the best espionage series ever written. Rare among thrillers, the Smiley books - there are nine of them, including A Legacy of Spies - score highly in both the qualities that people pretend to like in books (formal style, psychological portraiture, political intelligence, moral sensibility) and the qualities that people actually like in books (sex, violence, plot twists, convincing and frequently deployed spy jargon). Unlike Bond, Smiley regards the necessary violence and mendacity of espionage as a real moral problem, rather than a fun adolescent fantasy.Īlso unlike Bond, Smiley is the star of several smart, well-written novels. Unlike Bond, Smiley is married, and his wife dislikes him and cheats on him. Unlike Bond, he is fat and poorly dressed unlike Bond, he toils away at a drab intelligence agency, abstrusely referred to as the Circus, permanently plagued by bureaucratic infighting and petty office politics. (You could read A Legacy of Spies without reading its predecessors, but you’d miss out on some key details and characters.) The basic pitch is this: George Smiley is the anti–James Bond. If you’ve never read le Carré’s Smiley series before, A Legacy of Spies is an excellent excuse to start. It’s the best news in international relations all year. In his new book, A Legacy of Spies, Smiley - beta spymaster bureaucrat, cuckold savior of liberal Europe - finally returns. But with Western Europe tilting toward populist turmoil and grappling with new consequences of the communism’s fall, le Carré couldn’t stay away. Nearly three decades ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the U.S.S.R., John le Carré retired his greatest character, the potbellied English intelligence agent George Smiley, and turned away from Cold War, great-game spy novels toward one-off thrillers about gangsters, terrorists, and arms dealers. We are republishing this piece from September 2017 in commemoration of his work.
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