No imaginative writer successfully wrote one book on the cold war as a whole, although Norman Mailer's (1923- ) Harlot's Ghost represents a heroic effort in that direction. But the cold war period and the atmosphere of anxiety that characterized it proved to be a boon for one genre, the spy novel. The cold war ushered in a golden age of espionage fiction, none more successful than Ian Fleming's (1908-64) romantic fantasies, the James Bond novels, counting among its fans President John F. Kennedy.

But the author who, working in the tradition of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and Graham Greene (1904-91), moved the spy novel into the realm of serious fiction, was John Le Carre (1931- ), who used the spy novel, in the words of the critic Julian Symons, "as a means of conveying an attitude towards life and society."

In his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Le Carre takes the reader into the labyrinthine depths of a continuing, sinister struggle between Moscow Centre, headquarters of the worldwide Soviet spy apparatus, and its counterpart Cambridge Circus, named for its London location, shortened to the "Circus." The Circus has recently undergone sweeping changes, caused by the death by heart attack of its head, known as "Control." A new management team has come in and proceeded to push into retirement Control's trusted colleague, George Smiley, a man whose unimpressive appearance, “small, podgy, and at best middle-aged,” belies his cool intelligence and flawless intuition.

Olive Lacon, senior adviser to the "Cabinet Office" and watchdog of intelligence affairs, asks Smiley to conduct a private investigation to uncover a dangerous and destructive mole in the top echelon of the Circus. Smiley discovers that before his death Control had dispatched an agent, Jim Prideaux, to Czechoslovakia to bring back a Czech general, who could identify the traitor. Prideaux's mission was a complete failure: He had walked into an ambush and been shot, captured, and interrogated by the KGB, who seemed to know everything he had been sent to do. Prideaux was later repatriated and forced to retire. He is now teaching, under another name, at a preparatory school.

Control and Prideaux had narrowed the suspects to five people, one of whom was Smiley himself. The remaining four suspects are all part of the new team now running the Circus. Issues of trust and loyalty arise on virtually every page of the novel. Only Smiley, because of his disinterested stance, seems solidly outside the ray of mistrust. Yet as Lacon--who trusts him--puts it to Smiley: "It's a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. You do live by rather different standards, don't you? I mean you have to, I accept that. Our aims are the same even if our methods are different. . . . Difficult to know what one's aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you're British." Ricki Tarr, a marginal British spy, whose knowledge is crucial to Smiley's investigation, declares as he makes his revelations: "You must tell no one in the Circus, for no one can be trusted until the riddle is solved."

Domestic betrayal is a another prominent motif: Smiley's wife, Ann, a wealthy aristocrat, has had a public affair with her cousin, Bill Haydon, a respectable artist before he joined the secret service, and now one of the leading figures at London Station, headquarters of British intelligence. She is, in fact, "living quite wildly, taking anyone who would have her." And Peter Guillam, Smiley's trusted associate--the only Circus agent he does trust--is cuckolded by his Camilla, a beautiful 20-year-old flute player with whom he is living.

Smiley sets a trap for the mole at a safe house, from which it becomes clear that Bill Haydon is indeed the mole. He learns from Haydon that the betrayal was an "aesthetic decision" tied to the collapse of the British Empire, which Haydon and his generation had been trained to administer. In his eyes, Britain is now reduced to being an American lap dog.

Smiley also learns that Haydon's affair with Ann had been dictated by Karla, head of Moscow Centre, on the grounds that Smiley, knowing of the affair, would be blinded by it and thus unable to see Haydon clearly, underscoring the theme of the interrelationship of political and personal betrayal. At the end, Jim Prideaux, who was the former lover of the bisexual Haydon, exacts his revenge by penetrating the safe house where Haydon is being kept and murdering him, although, in keeping with the moral ambiguity that pervades the novel, no one accuses Jim of the deed.

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