Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. John LeCarre. Sceptre (1974)

This classic spy story is as fresh and gripping as when it was first published. The slow and destructive discovery of the identity of the Russian mole in British Intelligence is told with force and a terrible understanding of the price paid by people whose stock in trade is deception.

George Smiley is recalled from retirement when strong evidence emerges that the Russians have a double agent somewhere in the upper levels of British spy service, the Circus. Smiley has to track back over his own history as he follows the leads and suggestions to finally set a trap for the mole. This is about the laborious bureaucracy of spying, the filing and expenses, the time sheets and assessments that people far from the field carry out every day.
John Le Carre captures the extraordinary paradox at the heart of spying, the people who spend their lives deceiving others and living with mistrust as an operational necessity to stay alive require extraordinary loyalty and trust in and from their own organisation.
One of the strongest aspects of the story is the way that infighting among the managements is as fierce as any struggle with external enemies and ultimately considerably more dangerous. This is spying as office politics and anyone with some experience of working in an organisation would see how accurately Le Carre has captured the way power struggles work.

The man at the heat of this book, George Smiley is a wonderful creation, he is a shell of a man when he is out of the secret world, when he is back in he is a master player. He has a strong appreciation of the damage done to the people who live in that world, he is bound to it and to duty.The writing is lush and extensive, it takes it time, much as the story does and it is a pleasure to read the descriptions and the dialogue, they give force and weight to the plot which is brilliantly constructed and unwinds with tremendous skill. The atmosphere of the Cold War has not dated at all, the concentration on the human characters allows it to be a necessary context for their conflicts without dominating or distracting.A great read, thoughtful, sad, considered and wonderfully written.