Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1)

by John Le Carré

The Russians were always more imaginative in this respect, living in daily contact with shoemakers (forgers), neighbours (members of a sister service), pianists (radio operators) and the like. My clandestine vocabulary was therefore a small conceit, but when the BBC’s television version reached the screen, it became for a while a national amusement, for which I was duly grateful. How do I remember the book now, sixteen years on? Partly, I suppose, for the luck that followed it—the exposure of Blunt, the TV series, Alec Guinness triumphant as George Smiley, not to mention the marvellous direction and casting. And partly, because it restored my spirits after the miserable critical reception given to its predecessor, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. But mostly I remember it for the little boy Bill Roach, who had his counterpart in my own days as a schoolmaster, and later in A Perfect Spy as poor Pym’s son. Roach was not his name, of course, and he did not, so far as I know, spy on members of the staff. But I remember his watchfulness as if it had been my own, and I remember how deeply he got under my skin, perhaps because I could not help thinking of him as myself, when I was fifteen years younger. And I remember Connie Sachs, too, my Circus researcher, an archetype for the last generation of secret service vestals—clever, unhappy ladies of the English upper classes, who, having joined the service in the war, stayed on to fight the peace, making a kind of granary of their ext...