Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People by John le Carré

First published:Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1974; Smiley’s People, 1980

Type of work: Espionage

Time of work: Early and mid-1970’s, during the Cold War

Locale: London, Paris, Hamburg, and Berne

Principal Characters:

• George Smiley, an elderly British master spy recalled from dubious retirement
• Karla, his Russian adversary, head of the Thirteenth Directorate
• Bill Haydon, Karla’s agent in the British Secret Service
• Jim Priddeaux, a British spy and friend betrayed by Haydon
• Peter Guillam, Smiley’s protege and assistant

The Novels

Together with The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), these novels form the Quest for Karla trilogy, which pits the elderly British superspy George Smiley against the Russian master spy and head of the Thirteenth Directorate, Karla. Karla’s agent in place (“mole”) in the British Secret Service (called the Circus after its central offices at Cambridge Circus) is Bill Haydon, Smiley’s lifelong colleague and friend; Karla’s one humanizing flaw, his love for his daughter, is not safe from Smiley’s probes and eventuates in his downfall. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy chronicles the discovery that there is a mole in the Circus, Smiley’s intricately and stubbornly complete researches to find the mole, and the carefully planned capture of “Gerald,” the mole’s trade name. In this novel, Smiley embarks on his quest to rid the Circus of a traitor; in The Honourable Schoolboy, his task is to rebuild the Secret Service; and in Smiley’s People, he concludes the quest for his “Black Grail” by precipitating Karla’s downfall and defection to the West.

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré tells three principal stories, the tales of Jim Priddeaux, of George Smiley, and of the Circus’ decline. Priddeaux, the agent Haydon set up and betrayed in Czechoslovakia in Operation Testify to undermine the credibility of the service’s chief, Control, and send him into retirement, turns up repatriated as a language teacher at Thursgood’s, an undistinguished grammar school. There, he settles into a life of teaching and vigilance, nursing his wounded back and using the protocols of a field agent to monitor the security of his position. A loner, Jim nevertheless recruits the school’s wealthiest boy, Bill Roach, to become a watcher for him. Drawn into telling his tale to Smiley, Jim then stalks Smiley through the final stages of his search for the mole, and in the fullness of time, when Haydon has been interrogated and is about to be sent to Moscow, stealthily enters the secure training camp at Sarratt and executes Haydon by expertly breaking his neck. As the novel closes, Jim is back at Thursgood’s, still the subject of Roach’s watchfulness, carrying the burden of knowledge of his betrayer and of his own revenge.

The second narrative thread treats of George Smiley’s life, public and private, much of it presented retrospectively as Smiley shuttles between the present and the past, shoring up the fragments of his life. Having followed Control into retirement, Smiley finds his world deteriorating into a lethargic and irritable bachelorhood once his wife, Ann, departs with the latest in a string of lovers, mostly younger men, whose number also included Bill Haydon, with whom she spent the evening of the fated Operation Testify while Smiley was in Berlin. As le Carré unfolds the dismal world which Smiley inhabits, he establishes a prelude to the quest in the form of a summons delivered by Peter Guillam and the revelation by a field agent that events in Hong Kong lead to the inescapable conclusion that a senior member of Circus is, and has been for some time, a double agent in the ranks of Karla’s secret army. Responding to a request from the Ministry of Defense and reporting directly to Oliver Lacon, a Whitehall bureaucrat, Smiley retraces Control’s earlier investigations to find the mole. Smiley’s private world continues to surface in the remainder of the novel in his brief encounters with Ann, in others’ offhand or pointed inquiries after her, and in the personal dimensions of a life so formed by public service.

The third narrative strand involves Smiley, the members of the service who secretly report to him, and those of the service under suspicion and surveillance in an elaborate game of elimination based, as is the novel’s title, on the children’s fortune-telling game Control had used to prime Jim Priddeaux in the doomed Operation Testify. Jim’s mission was to discover the mole that Control suspected did exist, and Control gave each of the senior staff a code name from the rhyme. With Jim’s mission sabotaged, Smiley (Beggarman) is left with the task of unmasking Tinker (Percy Alleline), Tailor (Haydon), Soldier (Roy Bland), or Poorman (Toby Esterhase).

Following the tangled strands of information from Hong Kong to Oxford and the encyclopedic but dotty mind of Connie Sachs, formerly queen of research at the Circus, Smiley penetrates Operation Witchcraft, Source Merlin, and Gerald the mole. By reading the voluminous files which Oliver Lacon provides and Peter Guillam steals for him, Smiley goes back and forth in time, sifting information and matching dates and places, investing each individual with motives as he narrows his search. He discovers that Merlin’s information is largely disinformation, that Alleline’s reorganization of the Circus left Haydon operationally in charge of London Station, that Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov was not Merlin, but the mole was Merlin and Polyakov his case officer. Yet Smiley and the reader are still surprised that the voice Smiley hears in the carefully plotted trap for Polyakov and the mole is Haydon’s.

Smiley is once again in retirement as Smiley’s People begins, having served a term as chief caretaker of the Circus and having learned, perhaps too late, to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. Two events conspire to draw him out of retirement. The first is a ploy by a Russian agent in Paris to gain a new identity for a girl by persuading Maria Andreyvna Ostrakova that her daughter is alive in Moscow and wishes to come to the West. This prompts Ostrakova to write to an aged emigre, Vladimir the General, who in turn sends an emissary to Ostrakova to help identify the Russian agent. The second event involves the transfer of the identification to the General’s runner in Hamburg. This leads to the General’s murder while he is trying to meet with a Circus representative on Hampstead Heath and then to Oliver Lacon’s call to Smiley to identify the body, to prevent any potential scandal for the Circus, and to clean up after Vladimir, leaving no trace of a connection to the Circus.

Smiley is the logical consultant on the case, since Vladimir had called for him as Max, the cryptonym he had used to run the emigre networks as their “vicar.” In the course of cleaning up, Smiley intercepts a second letter from Ostrakova, now under siege in her Paris apartment, and finds the piece of film from Hamburg, which the General had concealed in a packet of cigarettes prior to his murder. These lead him on a relentless search for connections, the gathering of fragments of information from a variety of sources, including the lapsed emigre network in London’s Free Baltic Library, as he learns that Vladimir’s death is connected to the Sandman, a working name for Karla.

His purposeful itinerary through England, Germany, France, and Switzerland leads Smiley to enlist the help of a suspect art.dealer named Benati, also known as Toby Esterhase, retired from the Circus; Peter Guillam, now resident in Paris under diplomatic cover; and Connie Sachs, retired again after a brief return to the Circus. As Smiley pursues the identity of Ostrakova’s recruiter-turned-assailant and pieces together the shards from Connie’s memory, Smiley concludes that Karla has indeed prepared a legend and fabricated a biography, not for a female agent as claimed but for his demented daughter, whom he has placed in a Swiss insane asylum. Using Esterhase’s platoons of surveillance teams, ranging from “pavement artists” to “whisperers,” Smiley methodically sets the trap for Karla’s agent in Berne: Anton Grigoriev, Commercial Counsellor at the Soviet Embassy. The capture of Grigoriev, Smiley’s penultimate goal, leaves him in a position to dictate the terms of defection to Karla. With Karla’s agent in hand and the information he has pieced together, Smiley knows Karla’s position in Moscow is untenable: The Russian had used public funds to care for his daughter in Switzerland and had accounted for the expenses by forging yet another identity for a nonexistent mole code-named Komet.

Having presented terms that cannot be refused, Smiley prepares for Karla’s defection to the West in the no-man’s-land of Berlin and supervises what amounts to an anticlimactic surrender, a dubious victory which Smiley merely supposes he has won. Thus, the action of the trilogy ends as uncertainly as it had begun twenty years earlier with Smiley’s initial meeting with Karla in a Delhi jail.

The Characters

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 a member of Karla’s secret army.

Critical Context

Le Carré sounded an entirely new note in espionage fiction in the 1960’s, notably in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which served as a realistic counterpoint to the fantasies of Ian Fleming’s slick James Bond novels. His realistic treatment of the Cold War and its warriors and of fieldwork and trade-craft in his novels reflects a world of espionage devoid of glamour and sensational adventure but filled with an uneasy sense of disillusionment. Le Carré has successfully infused all of his spy fiction with the existential anxieties of the age set against a background of the decline and collapse of Empire, the frustrations inherent in political bureaucracy, and the apparent pointlessness of individual life. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, Smiley’s quest after the truth of situations and his clandestine investigations in the archives of the Circus and of the mind serve to give some meaning to the present by rehearsing and reordering the past, by shoring up fragments against the ruins of the present. These novels take their rightful place not only among the best in the subgenre of spy fiction but also in the larger tradition of the twentieth century postmodern novel.

Bibliography

le Carré, John. “England Made Me,” in Observer. November 13, 1977, p. 25.

Lewis, Peter. John le Carré, 1985.

Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré, 1985.

Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, 1978.

Sauerberg, Lars. Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len Deighton, 1984.