The TV serial of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy opens with a sequence of Russian matryoshka dolls with malevolent faces, emerging one out of the other, until the innermost doll emerges, with a face that is chillingly blank. And that seems to capture everything John le Carre is all about—his books, as well as his own personal life. A riddle, inside an enigma, inside a mystery.
What le Carre has created is, in fact, not so much a series of books as a special world of his own, rather like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi. A complex, ambiguous world, inhabited by people like Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam and Karla, where the laws of gravity work slightly differently, and they speak a special language of their own, with words like ‘tradecraft’, ‘lamplighters’, ‘cousins’, ‘babysitters’ and ‘moles’. And once you’ve entered this strange, parallel world, you feel the need for a...
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