I found this story terribly sad. You get the feeling from the beginning that Mayfly isn't going to make it, though I didn't realize it would be sacrificial. Even Taylor's death was the Department's fault. Sending non-agents or old agents with no new training was suicide. All that posturing for the Department to work with the Circus in the end anyway, in order to save face.

"He caught himself thinking, it's all right for them, and he remembered that nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind, between the living and the dying."

Surprisingly under rated. Excellent and best smiley I read yet.

really quite a sad book. is everything really for nothing?

John le Carré keeps surprising me in terms of the structure and topics of his spy novels. I was previously delighted with the Spy that Came in from the cold. This novel (The Looking Glass War) followed it (in the wake of its success), but painted a very different picture of the world of spies with a level of bureaucracy, stagnancy, incompetency and lack of understanding that must have been frustrating for readers as well as the political establishment at the time. I learned that the novel was not received very well, but I may be misinformed. Clearly John le Carré wrote many additional novels that reached the bestseller lists in the decades that followed. I was fascinated by John le Carré's ability to describe characters, their social interactions as well as level of motivation. There seems to be a lot of lost dreams withering in the British realm at this point in time with the Cold War as the elephant in the room.

Very different to Le Carre's earlier books, darker bleaker, with the spy mystery playing second fiddle to the internal power struggles of the British establishment. For me, the book is summed up by an early passage,where LeClerc, the tunnel visioned head of the Department, living in the memory of wartime glory, and young Avery, the new blood, visit the widow of a colleague killed in action- they look up at the awful tower block he lived in unbeknownst to them: this was not the world they were trying to protect. Yet they continue in their insular, Oxford haunted enclave, sacrificing people, double crossing allies, inevitably failing. Dark and sad, it is an powerful if not joyful read.

Really dull book