UPDATE 1/8/11: I'm moving this to a 5star. It's more for the Smiley trilogy as a whole than for this one in particular, but I need to honor how successful LeCarre actually is with them. I felt great emotional involvement with them, the kind of emotional involvement that comes only from great writing.

--------

This is a totally different LeCarre than with "The Honourable Schoolboy"! The old style organization and crispness are back, for example. And, more importantly, so is the old philosophical and existential outlook. It lacks the drifting ennui and confusion that makes the existential losses in "Schoolboy" so uniquely discouraging and nihilistic. Apparently, the Cold War, for LeCarre, with all of it's moral disasters and ticking timebombs for free societies, was more understandable and, in it's way, offered more actual clarity in terms of choices than the byzantine morass of the Eastern world will ever.

He also has at least one scene, Smiley's (probably final) visit to Ann, that reaches as far as the best in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" do in being almost cosmic in their significance rather than simply being characters interacting in a novel. For me, at least, it rang at the emotional key of Priam's visit to Achilleus. It was exhausting.

The ending..... LeCarre knows how to throw curveballs, doesn't he? I had stiffened my back for the coming dagger even! But would we read it different now if the Soviet Union had not fallen 10 years after "Smiley's People"? If moral compromises had not produced a "victory" of sorts? I think so. Smiley's history fades a bit now, and the foreground of hollow victories is overshadowed by the philosophical turn that has happened since "Honourable Schoolboy." What is the point, now, of The Quest for Karla? That some sense of justice, some order to the universe, does exist, no matter how rusted and decrepit they are, no matter the horrid and permanent losses sustained in searching for them. In the end, LeCarre is a believer, even if he might not know it.