Nostalgia for the Cold War

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre

What better book for a long airplane ride than a good old spy thriller? So it is with relish that I turned to John LeCarre’s Cold War tale about the hunt for a Soviet mole in British intelligence, and it didn’t disappoint. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starts with the aftermath of a botched espionage operation in Czechosolvakia, and an allegation  that there may be a Soviet mole at work. It is up to George Smiley to ferret out the mole and determine what went wrong. This is no action thriller - no cool guns, no whiz bang technology - but rather the patient solving of a puzzle. The dread and paranoia are palpable. One does have to pay attention, as the plot is complicated (I found myself mixing up the characters a few times). The author worked for MI5 (during the Kim Philby era, no less), so I imagine the details are accurate.

I feel that the espionage genre has suffered greatly from the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Islamic terrorists and international drug kingpins that populate present-day thrillers  just don’t make the same compelling villains that good old Soviet communists did. For one thing, we know the motives of the current bad guys - religious fanaticism and money, respectively. There is not the lure of competing ideologies and economic systems. No mystery over why someone would betray their country and spy for the other side. Plus, we do not for a minute think these new adversaries are just like us!, save for that Marxist-Leninist worldview. There is no nuance, and too much sickening violence. Fortunately, there are a number of John LeCarre’s books that I haven’t read yet, including three featuring George Smiley, so I can stay firmly rooted in the past. And when I run out of books, I have both the feature film and the television miniseries to look forward to.