Word: smiley
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...excels Le Carré in sense of place?particularly when the place is secret service headquarters. The sunless corridors, the peculiar amalgam of research, bureaucratic fatigue and hostility are brilliantly rendered. Power struggles become palpable: Smiley's conversations brim with silences and ambiguities; throwaway lines can hang a man, and one quiet meeting results in a British victory over some brash "cousins" in the CIA. Cruelty abounds, but so does guilt. Smiley believes implicitly in the need for clandestine agents, but he knows that his scholarly gains will soon be absorbed by his dreaded allies?the Americans...
When readers last left Smiley, he had just ferreted out Soviet Spy Bill Haydon?a "mole" who for years had unobtrusively buried himself in the British Secret Service. Haydon was manifestly based on Kim Philby, a principal strategist of British intelligence who defected to Russia in 1963 after two decades of spying for the Soviets. Britain's real Secret Service had to be rebuilt after the Philby scandal; the fictional one is equally shattered and in need of repair in the post-Haydon...
Derided as the "captain of a wrecked ship," Smiley tries to find a coup so stunning it will restore the Circus' reputation?and funding. From the outset, he has one obsessive target: Karla, head of Soviet agent operations, whose spectral face stares down from its frame in Smiley's office. The relationship of the opposing spymasters, playing international chess for men's souls, is worth a book in itself. Karla is an evil genius who once instructed his mole to seduce Smiley's wife?to make the Briton doubt his motives for suspecting Haydon. Smiley's pure, patriotic zeal...
...Drake Ko, an amoral Hong Kong millionaire, a conduit? Drake's brother Nelson is one of the two dozen most important men in Peking and perhaps also a Karla mole, one even more important than Haydon had been. Are the siblings estranged? Or is their relationship thicker then blood? Smiley backtracks through archives and files to find names, places, references once suppressed by Haydon. Midway through the paper chase, coherence emerges. A devious plan unfolds, vouchsafed piecemeal to the anxious reader. The opening moves are made with Jerry Westerby, an aristocratic refugee from occasional Circus assignments now living...
...just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain ... honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgement." Connie Sachs, Circus Sovietologist beyond compare, "a huge, crippled cunning woman, known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley's recessive factotum and "scalp hunter"?professional killer; Craw, an old China hand of archbishoprical speech and mien, shamelessly based on the form and choler of Sunday Times Correspondent Richard Hughes: "We colonize them. Your Graces ... we are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils...