Book review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer... or so Wiki would have you believe. Writing quality is good. The book is somewhat depressing, just because it is describing life in the early 1960's England, which sounds rather grim, though he may be laying it on for effect. I don't recall my parents complaining.

Overall: quite good, interestingly complex, but by now not as striking as I presume it was at its debut. Towards the end there is something of a shift in tone and it becomes heavily philosophical about the whole spying business, except that's not quite the right word; introspective might be better. But by then it is too late. It seemed a little jarring and somewhat forced. And the complaint - I think Leamas was the one complaining - seems rather trivial: he is quite happy when he was there to get Mundt killed, but when it becomes clear he is there to save Mundt and get Fiedler killed, he becomes very sad, and says it is all a rotten corrupt business. I can't see why. Liz puts forward the idea that Fiedler is "only doing his job" but since he is doing his level best in service of the Evil Empire, I don't see we need to care much about that. And, as I think someone in a Len Deighton says at one point: it isn't British police putting bullets through anyone's head without real due process: it is the Evil Empire doing it.

At the end, both Liz and Leamas die, Liz by Mundt's treachery I think; and Leamas by his own choice. But this reads more like a carefully contrived dramatic, sad, conclusion to the book than a plausible event: Mundt has every reason to want everything to go quietly; a messy death, with all the press and trouble with West German and UK authorities and the notice that would then bring to the East German authority, is not at all to his advantage.

At the trial, Mundt is saved when it becomes clear that it is all a clever Blitish Plot to implicate him: Liz's lease has been bought, the grocer paid off, and so on. And yet... these moves are terribly clumsy. How could the authorities, when calmly reviewing the record later, not start to wonder about him? Are we really supposed to believe they would leave him in post? His "miraculous" escape from England remains unexplained.

Fairly early on I guessed that Leamas was doing his "death spiral" in order to get picked up by the Evil Empire. Unfortunately, that meant that the exact details of his fall were somewhat "yes yes I see now get on with the actual plot please". Unfortunately part 2, I think that for actual realism, his fall needed to be longer drawn out; had I been an Agent of the Evil Empire, I'd have been fairly suspicious.