Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

⚖The case for it

It opens at a prep school, where a broken field man takes work as a teacher and befriends a lonely boy, and readers say the melancholy is set before any spying starts. Smiley is overweight, unassuming and openly cuckolded, and formidable because he remembers everything the service would rather forget. The investigation runs out of a rented hotel room on old personnel files and taped interviews, which readers describe as a chess match rather than a thriller. The archive break-in is the one sequence that gets pulses up. Office politics and budget fights carry the weight, and it “feels 100% authentic.” Readers call it a book that “transcends the genre.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Handlers, lamplighters, safe houses and scalphunters all arrive undefined, and the officers and past operations pile up faster than anybody can sort which of them matter. Readers say the first third is homework. The prose keeps its distance too, since “95% of the book is written in past perfect tense” and testimony arrives second-hand across shifting timeframes, which strikes some as “purposely convoluted to confuse the reader.” The women in the early chapters exist to be available. Everyone talks in the same erudite register, so “characters never spoke the way they were described.” One reader files the lot as “dated upper middle class twaddle.”

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings