Never read a John le Carre novel before and never too late to start. So picked up TTSS with the right earnest - the last time I picked up one of his novels i got confused pretty fast and gave up. This one started well with an interesting character who comes to school and meets a Billy Bunter kind of boy and things are looking interesting before it got too complex with too many characters and too many operations and code names and stuff. i feel i should watch the movie to get a hang of it. The title is code names for agents in the form of a children's rhyme.
Anyway the plot goes like there's a hero called George Smiley who is an ageing spy coming out of retirement or rather put in retirement thanks to a botched up assignment in which the other guy we started with gets badly hurt and is captured. The entire plot is about how there could be moles in British intelligence system from the Soviet Union and there's one overarching villain called Karla who Smiley is up against. Going by how things are, Karla is ahead of the game with moles all over. Smiley also has a problem with his unfaithful girlfriend who he cannot get over - its always those who get away that we cannot get over looks like. Anyway he has to find the mole in the top position and ensure justice is done until the next novel. This is the Karla trilogy and Smiley apparently appears in five novels.
Le Carre (not his real name) was a real spy and knows the inside out of stuff that happens which comes out. Only the many names, codes, nicknames and characters got me confused and I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked to. Jim Pridaeux, the first character, had a lot of promise but he disappears just when he gets interesting. Smiley comes across so slowly that it took me a long time to figure he is the protagonist.
No comments:
Post a Comment