Here’s how it starts, the opening sentence …
The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.
Come on, John, that’s not fair.
How can you start like that and get us hooked from the very beginning? You’re having a laugh. You’re laughing at us. From the first sentence.
We have questions:
- Who is Major Dover?
- And why’s he dropped dead?
Even before we were ready, even before we were paying attention, he’s gone, shuffled off this mortal coil. Dead, before we even had a chance to draw breath ourselves.
And more questions, too:
- Who on Earth is Jim?
- And what — or where! — is Thursgood's?
Nothing but confusion, from the start … and we're hooked! That's the way to do it. That's the way to write stuff, that's the way to start things off.
The whole of the first chapter carries on that way, carries on the intrigue. Thursgood's is a school, it turns out, and Jim a new teacher. But John, you tell us hardly anything else, leave us guessing. And, we discover, Jim isn't even the novel's main character!
What?!?
What a bonkers way to start things off. That's proper daring, starting your novel that way. You have to be John le Carré to pull off something like that.
Everyone thinks Tinker, Tailor is a spy novel, but it's not really. Well, yes, it is set in the world of spies and spying, that's certainly true, but it's not really about espionage at all. There's certainly precious little actual spycraft in the story, and if you're looking for wild adventures you might want to look elsewhere, an Ian Fleming or a Len Deighton, maybe. We never escape from the language and idiom of the spy world, but that is only the habitat in which these characters live.
In truth, Tinker, Tailor is about betrayal, about friendship and its failures. It's a story about men, driven men, about the destructive power of ambition, and how it's easy for truth to hide inside us. And it's about the yearning for purpose and meaning when what we thought was true is shown to be false or empty.
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children.
pg. 227
The novel follows George Smiley, John le Carré's most enduring character, now an ageing and unhappily retired spymaster. Smiley is brought back to help track down a Soviet mole in British intelligence.
Smiley was forced out of the service after a botched operation that resulted in the capture and torture of Jim Prideaux, the Jim of that opening sentence. The question is, who betrayed him? Suspicion falls on 5 men at the top of MI6, friends and ex-colleagues.
It's said that the novel is le Carré's examination of his own life and experiences, the people he knew when he was a spy himself. The 1950s and ’60s saw a bunch of revelations that exposed the Cambridge Five traitors, many of whom le Carré had known and worked with, people who had deeply covered all that they were doing to undermine everything he stood for. Le Carré was coming to terms with people he knew who were two things, diametrically opposed, at once. One character, Roy Bland, is drinking with Smiley at a bar:
‘You’re an educated sort of swine,’ he announced easily as he sat down again. ‘An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?’
pg. 167
In the same way, the book leads the reader to do the same — to leave naïvety behind, to examine one's own motives and those of one's friends, to understand what we believe in, what we are committed to, and why. The novel puts me face-to-face with my fragilities and false hopes, and asks me to be honest with them and with myself.
Reading Tinker, Tailor is an exquisite experience. Le Carré's language and his use of language is beautiful.
Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.
pg. 227
In Chapter 2, at the beginning of the story as Smiley is still trying to decipher the chaos that led to his retirement, he is given one devastating version of the downfall that also saw Control, the Head of Service, ejected.
The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.
pg. 23
I read that and I feel it with him, feel all the lethargy and terrible resignation that builds up but is still vulnerable and can be punctured with the right needling words.
Chapter 37, the penultimate chapter, opens with a sentence of such sublime and gentle revelation:
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
pg. 381
How can you do that, John? How can you take words, simple English words, and make them do such perfect things, help us understand ourselves and the world we inhabit?
A great triumph of this book's brilliance is that it has been given new lives — turned into a series for TV on the BBC in 1979, staring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, and more recently for cinema in a film of Tinker, Tailor with Gary Oldman in the main role. Both actors have breathed Smiley into existence in their own astonishing way. Both are testaments to the story's power, accolades and deepest compliments.
But the greatest experience is in the reading. So go on, get hold of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for yourself.