The Looking Glass War / A Small Town In Germany

by John le Carré

A Small Town In Germany

Genres: Espionage, Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.

Le Carré died at Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, on 12 December 2020, aged 89. An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carré died after sustaining a fall at his home.

abridged from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Phrodrick]

Among my most favorite terms in analyzing books or movies is one attributed to Alfred Hitchcock: The McGuffin.

A McGuffin is something that everyone in the story wants and acts as a complicated devise, but it is never what the story is truly about.

Another thing I like about the cold war world of John Le Carre’ is that the spy business is never about slick high-speed driving, hi tech gadgets and ladies who know what they want in lover. Le Carre’s agents are working stiffs. Making do with too little money and tracking expenses. Rarely eating richly and mostly reading the documents. Spy craft is grinding, dull and deadly when ignored.

A surface read of the Looking Glass war is that it is about spies learning trade craft and going after super some cold war super-secret whatzit. Indeed, we get lots of pages of secret meetings and training and what happens if your trade craft is not up to standard. Of course, the agent in the field can assume no one will have his back and the fate of the good guys is in his hands.

The ending of Looking Glass War has haunted me for years. Reading it one more time still has me shaken by it conclusion but seeing, if only a little better that the quest for the thing is secondary.
What is driving people? What do even the mid-level bureaucrats owe to King, country and his wife? This is the 1960’s it was always the wife back at home. Are the late nights and the secrets and the intensity really worth it?

A careful read is that the infighting between HRM’s bureaus may be more important than agent training. But ultimately John Le Carre’ is always asking about love, loyalty and duty. What are the motives of the characters? What do they really hold dear?

Also, in this volume is A Small Town in Germany. Again, and far more deliberately there are things being sought. Too many important things and the suddenly missing embassy, non-permanent, permanent local staffer who seems to have made himself too valuable and too omni present.
Headquarters trouble shooter, clean up man and no one’s friend Alan Turner arrives at the British Embassy in Bonn to determine what damage was done if the missing Leo Harting is a Soviet Spy. Making every part of his messy assignment that much more difficult is that Germany is on the threshold of electing a possible new Hitler.

Why asks Alan, does a spy steal? Why was he so visible, after the fact, in making up to, betraying and even sleeping his way into deep dust covered corners? Everyone has an opinion of and experience with Leo. No one knows him.

At the time John Le Carre; was writing these books he was doing; we still do not know what things as an employee of British Secret Agencies MI5 and MI6. Clearly, he was using as raw material what he was living. Just as clearly these are novels using the secret world to ask us to think about more than who has what plans or other secret things.

[Nelson]

It feels as if the longer JLC went on, the more corrosive and acidic his view of the services became. This omnibus volume combines a Smiley with a really sharply nasty tale of diplomatic and spycraft chicanery. The first tale is a colossal set of follies committed by 'The Department'—a collection of WWII intelligence leftovers desperately trying to assert their relevance in post-Iron Curtain Europe. The competition is, of course, with Smiley's vastly more competent Circus, though Smiley and elements of the Circus appear only tangentially here. Perhaps the saddest figure on this island of broken toys is younger John Avery who landed in the service after failing as a publisher. Drunk with the pompous tales of the Department's former derring-do, he is an eager sign-up for the latest bid for relevance: acting on a thinly sourced rumor that the Russians are putting missiles where they shouldn't go. Avery is not particularly good at anything and can't see through his aging superiors' misty-eyed dreams of doing something big again. So he gets roped into helping (re)train and sending off an old hand to do some on the ground recon. And it is a shit show of colossal proportions with predictably idiotic results. JLC's main point seeming to be that elements of the intelligence community are no less prone to self-aggrandizing errors that cost lives and money all in the name of buffing a resumé. It's pretty satiric. The second, longer, work in this volume is the story of an investigation into a potential spy within an embassy in Germany. The problems crop up just as the UK is trying to gain entry to the common market. The protagonist here is Alan Turner, an operative charged with getting to the bottom of some missing dossiers. His suspicion lights on a local within the embassy named Harting, but nothing it quite what it seems and the conclusion (again) is that everyone in the diplomatic / spy game is at some level hopelessly compromised by careerism and self-interest and other tawdry motives (apart from the too-blunt Turner, of course). As ever, the point seems to be, as in most of JLC's spy fiction at this date, James Bond is a lie and it is mere luck or the hard work of quiet beavers like Smiley that keep the planet spinning on its axis unexploded (for the time being).

[Steve]

2/8-2/9/18 : The Looking Glass War - 3.75* - Gives a great illustration of the mundane and tedious work that comes with being an intelligence agent, antithetical to the glamorous Bond inspired notion our culture conjures up upon hearing "British spy". In many cases (I suspect), as in this one, the tedium is to no end and for no purpose, unbeknownst to many of the players involved.

3/24-3/26/18 : A Small Town in Germany - 3.5* - More enjoyable Le Carre fare. Enjoyed the internal moral questions facing some of these characters. Found even more enjoyable that the answers to these questions are ambiguous at best, as I am still not sure what the "right" resolution was in my mind.

[Char Aznable]

Looking Glass War is a somewhat interesting small potatoes story about inter-department politics and the value of war time tools in peace time. It has a certain timelessness to it.

A Small Town in Germany is a quite boring story about 60s German politics. It feels extremely dated and uninteresting and I was already slogging through it after the first 20 pages or so.

[Harald König]

Buchrezension John le Carré
A small town in germany: 6,5/10

Interessanter einblick in das Bonn der 60er Jahre

[Nephi]

Being a spy is not what it's cracked up to be.

[Anthony]

Good stuff, always a safe fallback position if you're going away and don't want to risk being caught with a duff book. Don't read them for anything uplifting!