Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

by John Le Carré

Jim lived so precariously on the world’s surface that he might at any time fall off into a void; for he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on.

‘Living off the wits of his subordinates; well, maybe that’s leadership these days.’

It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?’

Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand.

Thereafter Bill Roach noticed a steady darkening of Jim’s face, and an alertness which at times was like an anger in him, as he stalked through the twilight every evening, or sat on the hummocks outside his caravan, indifferent to the cold or wet, smoking his tiny cigar and sipping his vodka as the dusk closed on him.

He knew that to recognise failure was to live with it; that a service that did not struggle did not survive.

He loved success, but he detested miracles if they put the rest of his endeavour out of focus.

‘Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

Sitting is an eloquent business, any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things.

His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat that way all day, without stirring a muscle.

He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life.

it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.’

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.’

I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma; not realising that it was my own reflection.