Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) by John le Carré
In the fifth novel with George Smiley as main character le Carré starts “The Quest for Karla”, a three novel storyline based around Smiley and his arch-rival Karla. I only read this novel and have to admit that I just learned about the other books. Therefore I cannot compare them.
In this novel Smiley, agent of the SIS, returns from his retirement to identify an enemy`s spy inside the SIS. In contrast to what you might expect the novel has almost no violent content at all. Most of the time Smiley is talking to different people and working himself through old files to finally identify the enemy`s spy. That the novel is such a big contrast to James Bond et cetera is probably the part I liked most about it. But I have to admit that this is it. While reading I could not help but feeling uninterested. There was no connection I had to this book, what I considered to be quite surprising, as I really enjoyed the film adaption of this novel.
