I like Le Carre's plotting and his characterization, but sometimes I find his writing inscrutable, which is to say, extremely hard to follow. That seems partly intentional, as if an extension of the byzantine machinations of the competing conspirators that the book depicts, and yet, it makes it difficult to read. All the same, I intend to finish the trilogy of Karla books, at least, and will likely read others by JLC in the future.

Feel totally gaslit. This book isn’t about Smiley at all. It’s about some wanker named Jerry who’s in love with a femme fetale drug smuggler he never even talks to. The first and last 100 pages are fine but everything in between is an absolute slog to get through. I’d have had more fun watching moss grow.

After several taut and tightly written books by the author, and the flabbier but still excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this one went more off the rails. The plot is excellent, the schoolboy is well drawn, but damn there was a lot of opaque and incomprehensibly idiomatic text. This was also the first by the author that felt intentionally cinematic. Then there’s the length. I suppose saying the author used too many words is a bit like the quip about Mozart using too many notes, but yeah, sometimes he did. Finally, and the reason I dinged this one a star is that the foreshadowing removed all surprise. Was it intentional? The fact that it still engrosses probably earns the star back, but I’m still irked by all the incomprehensible bits.

"Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young."

"I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country's goal. The enemy those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look around me now, I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers."

"He [Westerby] needed time, and in the event he helped himself to more than a week. Even now, he needed that long to bring himself to the point, because Jerry at heart was a soldier and voted with his feet. _In the beginning was the deed_, Smiley liked to say to him, in his failed-priest mood, quoting from Goethe. For Jerry that simple statement had become a pillar of his uncomplicated philosophy. What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does."

One day, thought Guillam, as he continued listening, one of two things will happen to George. He'll cease to care or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he'll be half the operator he is. If he doesn't, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do. Smiley himself, in a disastrous off-the-record chat to senior officers, had put the names to his dilemma, and Guillam with some embarrassment remembered them to this day. To be _inhuman in defence of our humanity_, he had said, _harsh in defence of compassion_. To be _single-minded in defence of our disparity_. They had filed out in a veritable ferment of protest; why didn't George just do the job and shut up instead of taking his faith out and polishing it in public till the flaws showed? Connie had even murmured a Russian aphorism in Guillam's ear, which she insisted on attributing to Karla. "There'll be no war, will there, Peter darling?" she had said reassuringly, squeezing his hand as he led her along the corridor. "But in the struggle for peace no a single stone will be left standing, bless the old fox."

A great story about personal loyalties (or the search for them) verses strategic loyalties that is chunky in the middle and has an ending that is 20% corny. Otherwise a solid part of the Karla Trilogy.