Book 14 - "The Looking Glass War" John Le Carre

[jazzy_dave]

The Looking Glass War is the fourth George Smiley book by John le Carré. Where the previous book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was about career spies, this is a more bittersweet tale about former military spies, trying to recapture to their former glory.

The spy part of "The Looking Glass War" is, of course, excellent. It concerns a former military espionage department in London (small, left over from the glorious days of World War II) and its struggle to train one of its former agents for a mission into East Germany. The technical background for the mission is well presented. The action itself, once it finally gets under way, is tense and doomed in a gratifying manner; we are given just the right sort of sketch-portrait of Leiser, the special agent. Moreover, as in "The Spy," we are given a strong sense that all this tension, duplicity and personal betrayal exist within the little world of espionage mostly for their own sake and not very much for the sake of the greater political good they are supposed to serve.

Again, Smiley is hardly the focus of the book. He appears more than he did in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and again one gets the idea that he (and Control) are playing puppet master with the characters in this book. But slightly bewildered puppet masters, as the military spies, led by Leclerc, jealously hide their machinations from the Circus and dig themselves in deeper.

My brother recommended another of his set in the sixties “A Small Town In Germany” which I will endeavour to look out for.