#ReadThis #WhomYouKnow #TinkerTailorSoldierSpy #JohnleCarre #leCarre Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by JOHN LE CARRÉ @lecarre_news @PenguinBooks #LondonPeachy #EnglandPeachy
We want to go to a wine bar with George and Peter off Charing Cross!!! We like Smiley even better now that he is quoting Scott Fitzgerald, God of the English World of Literature whom we hope is reading up there.
Time to improve the quality of both your reading life and also your vocabulary and personal word choice, America! The John le Carre hit parade continues with another winner in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and the Brits can't expect the Americans to know that nursery rhyme, but do look it up so you can appreciate the le Carre brilliance even more. This is this author's third successful book recommendation on Whom You Know; it was preceded by:
A Legacy of Spies
and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
No one is coming in from the cold in this current Manhattan weather, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is exquisite outdoor reading if you can stow away on a piece of paradise where it is quiet and deserving of the company of this great work. Originally published in 1974, Tinker Tailor Solder Spy is more than just a catchy name. It's the continuation of the intelligence of George Smiley and his team, and it is a page tuner that must be added to your collection. Of course if we knew how much we'd like all of these, we would have read them all starting in the beginning which you should, and conclude with A Legacy of Spies.
The edition we read was furnished with an introduction by le Carre from 1991 and his retrospective thoughts certainly are another plus to set the stage for the first page. For everyone else that has attended boarding school (like Peachy, but she did as a day student), you'll appreciate the Jim's venture at Thursgood's, and in a roundabout way you will discover just what did happen to Prideaux, the admirable passionate Englishman. Never forget the singular asset of being a watcher, Roach. Stay away from the Siberias of Brixton...
Betrayal is never pretty, and what goes around, comes around. It happens in more ways than one, and someone's the Cheshire Cat at this Tea Party. We love the wisdom: "There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur." (p. 360)
You've got to read each line and every word, nevermind sentence, with razor-sharp precision so you don't miss a thing. Reason as logic, or reason as motive? Or reason as a way of life? The world as seen from the perspective of a spy is illuminating to the average person that is far from it, and you'll be intrigued beyond belief. Merlin, Testify...Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy!
Of course, you can expect to see all the spellings to be British English, just in case you didn't realiZe it was different. The perceptive will know that capital Z is not a typo.
The descriptions continue to be stellar: "All his awareness was behind him, fixed on the black revolver and the bands of chamois leather; on the pen-tops that turned to bullets as Jim threaded them methodically into the chamber, his lined face tipped towards the lamplight, pale and slightly squinting in the dazzle." The intrigue beguiles you with every turn of the page, drawing you in and haunting you until you can pick it up again.
Ann used to say, "There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing; there is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." (p. 80-81)
Don't be a nothing do-er.
READ THIS.
Peachy said so.
Plus, you want to.
We'll take Beggarman any day.
John le Carré was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Bern and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.
Last year, John le Carré’s A LEGACY OF SPIES was a literary sensation, landing at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and named one of the best books of 2017 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others. A LEGACY OF SPIES was the first novel in over twenty-five years to feature George Smiley, le Carré’s most famous and beloved character, and, as Kirkus Reviews put it, “the miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.” On May 1st, A LEGACY OF SPIES will be published in paperback by Penguin Books.
In A LEGACY OF SPIES, le Carré interweaves past with present so that each character may tell their own intense story, and has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.
For more than fifty years John le Carré has written novels that have come to define our age, from his extraordinary Cold War novels to his powerful depiction of the War on Terror in his novel, A Delicate Truth. He is one of only a handful of writers whose novels have been successfully adapted for the big and small screen and whose characters have been interpreted by the greatest actors of their time: in the 1960s by Richard Burton; in the 1970s by Alec Guinness; in 2005 by Ralph Fiennes; in 2014 by Philip Seymour Hoffman. In 2016, The Night Manager aired as a six-part series on AMC and became an award-winning critical hit. This fall, AMC will air the six-part TV adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl, directed by legendary filmmaker Park Chan-Wook in his television debut, which stars Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Shannon.
