“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is a 1974 spy novel from English novelist John le Carré, at the time already world-renowned for being the author of the hugely popular novel “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” and also known for the fact that he gathered much of his insight into the world of professional government sanctioned espionage via his own employment with the British Security Service as well as the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6). With “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carré crafted what may be his best work, a story about a Soviet mole implanted deep in British intelligence, which itself was inspired by the very real Cambridge Spy Ring. The antithesis of the typical spy story, instead of the car chases and shoot outs of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the spy novels of John le Carré are largely internal affairs, with personal relationships and ideologies doing all the heavy dramatic lifting. Instead of spies trying to stop cartoonish villains from enacting their worldwide takeovers from within their secret volcano lairs, these are tales of morally ambiguous people who justify their actions through “love of country,” and who struggle with the things they are tasked with carrying out. And when there is a conflict between people, it is almost always of the psychological nature, a war of information and of temperaments, as opposed to a war of artillery and bloodshed (though there is still usually some bloodshed). The mole hunt of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” epitomizes this, as it openly asks the question, “Who can spy on the spies?”Continue Reading …