Book Club: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Circus has already suffered a bad defeat, and the result was two bullets in a man's back. But a bigger threat still exists. And the legendary George Smiley is recruited to root out a high-level mole of thirty years' standing - though to find him means spying on the spies.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is brilliant and ceaselessly compelling, pitting Smiley against his Cold War rival, Karla, in one of the greatest struggles in all fiction.

There is always a bit of healthy competition within a book club - who has the best track record, whose tastes are guaranteed to clash etc - but it's always a bit rubbish when you keep picking  books no one likes. As it happens, I haven't loved any of my choices so far but an on-going joke has begun that one member has continued to pick the worst... one novel receiving a record 2 out of 10. But when she announced that the next book would be the Cold War classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré, we all felt pretty hopeful!

I immediately revealed that I'd seen the film (hardly going to miss anything that stars Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth AND Gary Oldman all in the same film) at which point everyone's excited faces vanished at the thought of having to risk another choice. I explained, though, that luckily I have absolutely no idea what the hell happened. I remember standing up at the end of the film turning to my sister and both of us shrugging our shoulders - neither of us had a clue what had just happened - and it seemed neither did the rest of the cinema. It was made all the more frustrating because I could tell it was a good film; I miraculously managed to feel all the tension and appreciate the acting without understanding the plot.

And that, really, is how best to sum up the novel. One person didn't get past 120 pages once she'd realised after a trusty Wiki search that she had not picked up any of the plot so far. The rest of us all felt it was well written, easy to read in terms of literal sentence structure/syntax etc, but so deliberately obfuscating that we found ourselves completely lost in this world of espionage where there were a billion characters, all with about three code names and constant jumping back and forth in time and a maze of conversations within conversations. It took me about 200 pages before I could identify any of the characters from the film.

That said, I did feel, at least in the first and final thirds, that the inevitable structure of characters reporting back to their superiors meant that there were moments where everything was clarified that helped you catch up. Unfortunately if you skim read over that important conversation, you were pretty screwed for another 150 pages.

I loved being immersed in the politics and drama of the Cold War, though, which felt all the more authentic somehow after taking into account that the book was first published right bang in the middle of it. Doesn't everyone secretly hope that they will be picked up at university as some bright young hope for the secret service?? Would be the coolest thing ever. I suspect the fact that i use words like 'cool' means that I will never be considered...

All in all, I liked Le Carré's writing and I loved the ending, which I felt built up tension brilliantly, so I felt I should have enjoyed the novel a whole lot more than I did. As one person put it, there was just no satisfaction at the end of the book because I ultimately wasn't 100% sure whether I'd got everything. Wikipedia certainly proved me right on that point.

Overall the book club gave an average rating of 5/10 and I gave it a 6/10