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.