The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking-Glass War - Hardcover

John Le Carré

4.21

155 ratings by Goodreads

9780340623220: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking-Glass War

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340623225 ISBN 13: 9780340623220

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, [1994], 1994

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'The best spy story I have ever read' Graham Greene With this superb, now classic novel of suspense, le Carre changed the rules of the game. His story is of one last breathlessly perilous assignment for the agent who wants desperately to end his career of espionage - to come in from the cold.

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Review:

It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carr�'s first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.

Le Carr� beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carr� was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carr� writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo

From the Inside Flap:

"Le Carre is simply the world's greatest fictional spymaster."
NEWSWEEK
For Leamas the espionage business has become an hermetic, enclosed world, detached from outside reality. He has watched his last agent being shot, crossing from East to West Berlin, and his death marks the end of the Circus' East German network. But Control is planning an operation against the head of East German Intelligence. And Leamas is to be the instrument, set in East one last time....

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