I’ve been reading, I promise. I’ve also been busy forgetting to write about what I’ve been busy reading. That’s just real dumb of me because now I have to go back and try to remember what I read, which was the whole point of me writing about these books in the first place. Ugh.
So first I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre. I liked this one! It’s a spy mystery, which had me a little skeptical at first. I mean, I like watching spy movies just fine, but I wasn’t so sure about having to read one. However, this was not at all what I expected. Tinker, Tailor is not at all an action-packed, shoot-’em-up, Matt Damon-starring spy thriller. It has some action. It has a little shooting. It has a few thrills. But for the most part it’s way more focused on the psychological, on the mindset of the spy, than on the action. It shows the spies as real people, and these people are definitely not James Bond. These spies are overweight people, injured people, people whose wives cheat on them, people with children at home, people who live in fear.
Set during the Cold War, the premise of the mystery is that there is a Russian mole at “The Circus,” the name given to the British Secret Intelligence Agency, and middle-aged, chubby, retired George Smiley is charged with the task of finding out who the mole is. The story backtracks through the memories of George and several other key characters to build the timeline of events that lead to the discovery of this double agent. The name of the book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, refers to code names from a nursery rhyme that I’ve never heard of.
Wikipedia tells me that there may be a movie in the works.
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