Nearly two decades ago, in Call for the Dead, John le Carre introduced us to George Smiley and began, along with Len Deighton, a reformation and exaltation of the spy novel as a literary genre. In Smiley's People, the latest and last of Smiley's labyrinthian confrontations with his Russian counterpart Karla, le Carre both completes an epic story and reveals the temporal limits of his chosen form. Smiley has been with us for so long now that it is difficult to appreciate the huge change le Carr...

Le Carré's recent novels have portrayed, with a great deal of detail and diligently evoked atmosphere, two distinct worlds of espionage: Smiley's world in London, a domain of desks and files and intrigues and research, an awkward corner in the corridors of Anglo-American power; and the world of the active agent, the field…. In "Smiley's People," Smiley works both worlds, is both detective and agent at risk. I won't disclose the oblique, slow-moving plo...

The Master of Stasis has returned, driving his dense herd of auxiliary words to the glue factory. John le Carré is back again with the same novel as before…. Le Carré has to be an Olympic-class sprinter but not a distance runner. In those stretches of [Smiley's People] which are the nub and reason for his story, he is brilliant. He is a gifted short-form writer who has decided that the longer form could be more rewarding…. Smiley's People seems to me to have been me...

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 e...

Spy stories have a good deal of the farrago in them even when they are as accomplished as le Carré's and it would be impossible and unfair to give away his elaborate plot [in Smiley's People]. Le Carré creates a manner which moves by suggestion, leaking a little at a time and gradually gathering all in, without reducing it all to a flat intelligence test or conundrum. He has got to make his implausible people plausible in their dirty and shabby game. In part he belongs to the rom...

The espionage novel has become a characteristic expression of our time … and John le Carré is one of the handful of writers who have made it so. The fact that this form of writing has assumed this importance tells us something essential about ourselves…. Smiley's People is such a book, and what it tells us is clear enough: that we are now engaged in an intense dialectical process; that the terms on which the process operates have no regard for traditional human values except as p...