Reviews

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré

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thecleangoblin's review

mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Good but depressing. Well written but not enough action. I want glitz and glamour from my spies not gritty realistic misery where everything feels futile.

I can see why this is such a classic but I wasn't drawn into the story or characters.

That's just me though. Perhaps this is a holiday read where you can look up and see sun, sand and beauty and that helps battle the ugliness of humanity and the dreary setting.

To be fair, the protagonist himself berates a key character on the expectations of espionage:

"What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing "Cowboys and Indians" to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?"

Squalid is correct and I guess I just wasn't in the mood for that.

mrrosenberg's review

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

3.5

1mpossiblealice's review against another edition

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4.25

I've no idea why it's taken me so long to get to book three when I enjoyed the first two so much. This is the first really famous one I've read, and I get why. Looking at it now I've finished, it's very bleak. But it didn't feel that way when I was reading it - I was engrossed in the world and really gripped, especially towards the end when I knew something was going to happen to change things, but didn't quite know what. Le Carre is a great writer, and very easy to read (which for some reason I didn't expect). I'm sure if I read this again I would pick up more than on the first read too, it feels like that kind of book.
I also found it really interesting as social history - I had to google when the Berlin Wall went up as I knew nothing about the history apart from when it came down. My edition also had an afterword written by Le Carre in 1989, which was interesting.
An excellent read, but not one if you want something light-hearted!

cecile87's review

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2.0

I appreciate that this is a modern classic, and that the writing was appropriately claustrophobic to set the tone.

However, I did not like the characters, except for the young woman who was true to her beliefs and even the Jewish Nazi-wannabe.

The ending was true to the storyline, but felt empty nontheless.