Of the five le Carrés I’ve read thus far, this is probably my least favourite. It’s meant to be satire, but it’s unclear to me as to which bits are satirical — unless it’s the bureaucracy, incompetence, and bumbling nature of the intelligence agencies. In this case, just because it’s probably pretty accurate doesn’t mean it’s fully. 

The book is divided into three sections. In each section, an operative for a black-ops or clandestine division called the Department runs a mission, and the sections play out serially. While the Department is adjacent to the Circus and reliant on it, it’s also independent of it and allowed to run its own missions. 

In this book, the Department gets a tip about the Soviets building up arms in a fictional town in West Germany. They get a commercial pilot to fly his plane off course to get overhead shots of the site. In the first run, the agent is meant to meet the pilot at an airport in Finland to grab the film from the pilot so the Department can verify the intelligence and act accordingly.

The agent, upon receiving the film, decides to walk back to the hotel in the inclement weather in the dark as he can’t find a cab. A car runs into him and he dies. Was it an assassination or an accident? We are never told.

The second mission has Avery also fly to Finland to

retrieve Taylor’s body and the film.

. Only, small problems: the papers are out of date, some of the explanations don’t hold, and he isn’t successful. Instead, he’s setting off all the red flags. 

Finally, there’s Leiser’s run. Leiser, a Pole that the Circus worked with during the war, is sought to go undercover into Germany to find out what’s happening on the ground with these missiles. Slight problem: Leiser hasn’t been in the field for years. Heck, he’s not been an agent for years. The department find a house in Oxford and spend months training him in combat, transmitting encrypted messages (memorising the cipher), and ensuring he’s up to the task. Spoiler: he’s not. 

As soon as he crosses the border into Germany, he panic-kills a young boy, the news of which spreads like wildfire. Eventually he finds his way into the town, and the first time he’s transmitting a message to London, he forgets to change the crystal. (The crystal controls the frequency at which messages are transmitted and need to be changed pretty often — 2.5 minutes — to ensure no one listening on different frequencies identifies clandestine comms.) 

Immediately, these transmissions are found out and on one hand they can’t believe their luck — who transmits a long message on a single crystal, surely it’s an amateur? 

As things go horribly awry in Germany, us readers are led to believe that the Circus intentionally sabotaged the mission by giving the agents old technology and also perhaps being fully aware that the original photographs allegedly showing missiles were not real. 

Leiser is abandoned in the field, much to Avery’s chagrin — the two had struck a warm friendship during training — but that’s protocol.

I just… the lack of skill, the complacence, the foolishness… was not enjoyable to read. If I’m reading a Cold War spy story, I want cunning and spy v spy and excellent skills even if it’s cynical and morally ambiguous. 

The first half of this book is rather slow, but once Fred Leiser is introduced, the story becomes much more enjoyable. There’s a lot of interaction between the main characters, and the feelings that Leiser and John Avery develop for each other were really compelling to me. The relationship between these two is what makes the latter half of the book most interesting, in my opinion. (It’s so homoerotic?? I swear straight men write some of the gayest things.)
There’s a lot of description of the nitty gritty of espionage tradecraft, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s something I enjoyed. Like le Carré’s other books, this story is more focused on tradecraft and technique than action.
Le Carré also did a great job of letting certain themes echo throughout the book: love, faith in one’s duty, guilt, friendship, trust, futility. The latter portion of the book really made my heart ache at times.
I do think that the beginning half of the book could have been cut down, but ultimately I felt the latter half made up for the stagnation of the first. I would have appreciated a bit more of a concrete ending, because that’s just the type of ending I prefer in a book, but my hope is that the cliffhanger will be resolved in upcoming books.