Word: smileyness
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...great tradition, Smiley's People begins with minor violence. An obsolete agent has been shot. His terminal message is broadcast to Smiley, onetime head of the Circus-the British Secret Service. But détente is now the order of the day, and the Circus is anxious to bury both the victim and his story. Ordinarily, the ultimate company man might agree. But behind homicide Smiley detects the ruthless spirit of Karla, his longtime adversary in Moscow. Publicly accepting the injunction of superiors, Smiley decides to do a little freelance investigation. On the scent from London to Germany...
From the airless corridors of London to the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Smiley battles Karla as masters play chess by mail, visualizing the opponent, pondering alternatives, waiting agonizing days for the next move. And herein lie the novel's aggravating weaknesses. Readers have been here long, long ago. Smiley, the cerebral sleuth, may be as corpulent as Nero Wolfe, but in this adventure he is suddenly Sherlock Holmes redivivus. His obsessive enemy is a new version of Dr. Moriarty. The audience is Watson, condemned to wonder what the detective is up to when he examines those cigarettes...
Those conflicting observations give Smiley his dimension and Smiley 's People its distinction. Yet aficionados must view this work with mixed feelings. It is melancholy to realize that a weakly plotted book contains the secret agent's last bow. It is reassuring to know that even now John le Carré, Circus Master, is in Switzerland pondering the next big act for the center ring. - Stefan Kanfer
...private house, thought Smiley ... A restaurant? Too furtive, too guarded-and surely they would have announced themselves as they picked up the phone...
...force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time? ... All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall's skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim-or even reluctant prophet-of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon...