The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
by John le Carre
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Book Summary Information
Author: John le CarreIntroduction: John le Carre
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-01
ISBN: 0802714544
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Walker & Company
Book Reviews of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Book Review: Once Upon A Time, There Was This Wall...
Summary: 5 Stars
John le Carré's early fiction takes me back to the days when there were clearer distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. Yet much of the tension of this, his most famous novel published in 1963 before I was born, questions those very distinctions with a tale of a man cruelly used in the service of a fiendishly clever plan.
Alex Leamas is a British secret service operative who has just lost his last man behind the Berlin Wall, the Soviet-imposed breeze-block-and-barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin. Now he wants revenge against Mundt, the East German counterintelligence chief responsible for their deaths. Which is just what his bosses offer him, under the cover of putting Leamas out in the cold himself and into the hands of the East Germans, where Leamas can then go to work on undoing Mundt.
"You can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?" the shadowy figure called Control tells Leamas. Leamas senses something off in this, but goes along just because it's rather personal between him and Mundt.
Le Carré crafts a tightly wound, ever-constricting narrative framework that communicates within it a larger message, that maybe counter the views of both East and West the rights of the individual do sometimes matter more than the perceived safety of the masses. It's a rare book where the author's philosophy actually thickens the plot considerably, as we are made to care about Leamas the pawn more than almost anyone else in the story, including Leamas himself.
Bleak but never dull, "Spy Who Came In From The Cold" is a quick read. Regular le Carré readers more familar with his later novels will be surprised by his lack of narrative digression, though many of his later calling cards, such as May-December romances and the sense of rot within Western power structures, are here in full display. Critics sometimes have at le Carré's habit of setting long sequences that consist of people talking to each other in place of action, and that happens here, too, but when le Carré is on like he is here, those chat-fests have a way of feeling more deadly than gun battles do in other thrillers.
The best involve Leamas and an East German spy named Fiedler. Fiedler is a true believer in the Soviet system and thus sees nothing wrong in killing individuals in service of the State. Does that make him wrong? Leamas believes in nothing, it seems. Does that make him better, or worse? Conversation between them is biting, funny, and ultimately more than a bit heartbreaking.
Do I think this is the quintessential spy novel? Well, overall I probably enjoy reading Fleming or Forsyth more than le Carré, but when he's this good, there's no one to touch him. It's a novel that makes points that stick with you, while at the same time delivering suspense and excitement in sometimes overpowering doses. Like I say, the two kind of work together, which is why people still consider this a classic even if it is a bit of a relic, too.
Summary of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
A new hardcover edition of the book Graham Greene called ?the best spy story I have ever read.?
On its publication in 1964, John le Carré?s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports anyone who reads it back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published, and it remains one today.
It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.
Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo
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