John le Carré, who appears to know everything about modern espionage that there is to know, faces the problem in his spy fiction of giving a generally favorable account of British Intelligence in the very era of … spectacular betrayals and defections. And he must do this, if we are to take him at all seriously, without undue indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasy and razzle-dazzle effects. It is an interesting problem and tension in the work of a writer whose readiness with razzle-dazzle has earned him a large popular audience and yet whose novels seem seriously to try to tell the truth about his time. Is he a serious novelist, or a mere entertainer, or something in between? Here is le Carré's new novel, Smiley's People, to help determine that question.

Smiley's People completes a massive trilogy begun in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and continued in The Honourable Schoolboy...