If you have ever been curious about exploring John Le Carré’s writing, this Trilogy (titles listed in order in the next paragraph) from his George Smiley series would be a great place to launch from. I learned in the author’s notes that his intention was to continue the conflict story between George Smiley and the head of Russia’s most top secret intelligence agency for several novels. However, T.V. and movies got in the way – the key characters had become so closely associated with the actors w...

Smiley comes out of retirement was his people come under attack in this aptly named conclusion to the Karla trilogy.This is fantastic stuff! Taut tension, high stakes, personal vendettas...ah, it's all wonderful. The characterizations and conversations are finessed with an admirable subtly. The Cold War settings descriptions put you in the middle of these depressingly drab locations. John le Carré is on fire in Smiley's People!It's far more cerebral cold war spy novel than say Fleming's stuff. T...

"Like an archaeologist who has delved all his life in vain, Smiley had begged for one last day, and this was it."Smiley’s People is the extremely satisfying conclusion to John le Carré’s Karla trilogy. Having finished the first in the trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) in March and the second (The Honourable Schoolboy) in April, I was able to sink into this installment with reasonable ease. Although once again presented with a fairly large cast of characters, I was more readily able to wrap

The conclusion of the trilogy that starts with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; but, while that book is about betrayal, this one is about manipulation. The heartbreaking message is that, when you want to manipulate someone, the most effective approach is not to try and exploit their weaknesses. Needless to say, that can work too. But the very best way is to exploit their kindness, their decency, and the things that make them a worthwhile human being. It's been done in many other books too, of course,

What is so exhilarating and fulfilling about reading le Carré is the sense of genuine intelligence at play, both in the characters and in the author. There are different ways of trying to convey great cleverness in a literary character: one approach is to give them superhuman deductive skills à la Sherlock Holmes, you know – I perceive, sir, that you have recently returned from a hunting excursion in Wiltshire and that your wife's tennis partner owns a dachshund called Gerald — But my dear fello...

Note for completists: This is the third of the Karla books, preceded by first Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then by The Honourable Schoolboy. While it is possible to read these books out of order and still enjoy them, the later books are informed by the events that come before and definitely spoil salient plot points of those novels.Life has not been overly kind to George Smiley. Devoted husband to a faithless wife, dedicated servant to a government that does not admit he exists, archnemesis

4.5 ☆ rounded up Our future was with the collective, but our survival was with the individual, and the paradox was killing us every day. In Smiley's People, George Smiley is no longer the Chief of the British Secret Service. Smiley had "retired" several times before from the Circus, but this stint - going on 3 years - has the scent of permanence. But is a peaceful and uneventful retirement possible when a spy's skill is revealed by the combination of longevity and faultless memory? On the surfa...

This book changed my life. My dad, sick of hearing me make fun of his spy novel proclivities, bet me $50 that I would love this book. It was a safe bet, too. If I loved it, I owed him nothing other than the smug satisfaction of having been right. If I hated it, he'd give me $50.I loved it. I love the entire trilogy, in fact, but since I read this one first, out of order (tsk tsk dad) it has the special place on my favorites shelf. And even though I now own THREE copies, this edition was my fathe...

Smiley’s People is the last book in the “Karla Trilogy”; a series that describes the world of espionage during the Cold War. The story starts with a revelation by a ‘lost-agent’ recently resurfaced that at the very top of Circus (British secret service) there is a KGB agent, a mole spying for the Russians. And he is there for decades. Dangerous, resourceful and one of their own, this double-agent is capable of wrecking havoc if he isn’t caught immediately and off-guard. Here Smiley is called bac...

And so we have come to the conclusion of the Karla trilogy, in which John le Carré pits quiet, self-effacing George Smiley of the Circus, the British espionage agency, against Karla, his ruthless Soviet counterpart. In the first book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we learned how Karla used a "mole" placed in the Circus decades before to threaten both Smiley's intelligence service and his marriage. An unbiased judge would probably give that round to Karla.The middle volume, The Honourable Schoolb...

The best of the best ... everything a spy novel could possibly be ... Smiley vs Karla ... a weakness, a mistake, a brilliantly orchestrated response ... and of course the bridge into West Berlin.Smiley's People is also a master class in writing ... when to expand, when to move quickly, setting a scene, using peripheral characters. I think I'll read it again. But for now, I will go into my class next week at Oxford - British Spies in Fact and Fiction - as prepared as I can be and ready to learn m...

A deeply introspective slow burn with a deliberate, measured pace, much like Smiley himself, that nonetheless delivers an incredibly taut end-game. Smiley remains a puzzling figure. Understated and unassuming, possessed of a particular brilliance and practicality which sadly he doesn't seem capable of leveraging in his personal affairs."I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land."Whether le C...

In memoriam, as Mr. Le Carre has now left the building.This is only one, and perhaps the most representative, sample of his genius, perception and empathy. Had it not been for the ever-annoying prejudices which also afflicted masters like Graham Greene, Mr. Le Carre's oeuvre would have been recognized in its truest merits. Not that it hasn't but still, he was not a spy writer. He was a great writer.

This is my absolute favorite le Carre novel--and in my view the best of the Karla Trilogy. All the cerebral incisiveness of Tinker, Taylor, married to a well-constructed, suspenseful, and active plot. A real crescendo of a novel.

This was stunning - quite possibly a perfect novel. It would almost be an insult to describe it as a great example of its genre, for le Carre is such a splendid writer that he elevates his tales of espionage to the level of true literature. While other of his works exhibit the slight flaw (in the case of Tinker, Tailor it was more than slight) of an overly-complex plot, here le Carre keeps things just simple enough that the reader can keep up without too much difficulty. The "tradecraft" is stil...

Some faces, as Villem had suggested this morning, are known to us before we see them; others we see once and remember all our lives; others we see every day and never remember at all. And, so it is with literary characters, some are so like us that we know them instinctively; some are not like us at all but completely unforgettable; and others are forgotten the moment we close the pages of the book. George Smiley is of the second sort, he wiggles his way into your sensibilities and lodges him

Revisit via filmDescription: John le Carre's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.Rounding off his astonishing vision of a clandestine world, master storyteller le Carre perfects his art in "Smiley's People."In London at dead of night, George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Cir...

The last book of le Carre's Karla series might be the best. I turned to this book after watching the recent -- and excellent -- film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (I read the book many years ago). I don't know why it took me so long to finish this series, since I also loved the second book, The Honorable School Boy. Maybe I just didn't want the series to end. In this chapter Smiley finally goes on offense against his nemisis, the Soviet spy master, Karla. But it takes him over half

I've been watching Roberto Rossellini's The Age of the Medici this afternoon. Or about the middle two and a half hours of the four hour long 'mini-series'. I've been really enjoying it and surprisingly I haven't gotten too distracted watching it (this is something of a rarity for me in the past two years or so, I can probably using my fingers and toes all of the movies I've been able to make it through since the start of 2009). It's made me wonder though why the thought of watching movies leave

The first thing I have to say is IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE FIRST TWO BOOKS IN THE TRILOGY, DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT READING THIS BOOK!Okay, sorry 'bout the all caps, but you cannot possibly read this book in isolation and enjoy it in the way that it was meant to be savored and enjoyed. This is the ultimate book in a trilogy, and all the pieces come together, characters deepen, brief glimpses of characters and places make sense, and the hard work that you've done to get to this point because of le Ca...