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I had read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold on my honeymoon in Paris, and I remember liking it, but not rushing out to get more Le Carre. Well, now I'm going to rush out to get more Le Carre.

I didn't give this five stars because it was a touch slow to get moving. I think if I'd just been able to focus a little more, I would've been into the plot faster. Le Carre has this ability to make every character a mystery. So much is withheld from the reader, and yet the characters are fascinating. I think what put me off about the beginning of the book is that I became very interested in Jim Prideaux, then had to shift gears to Smiley. Eventually, I got into the Smiley stuff, but at first, I just kept waiting for Prideaux to come back, and he didn't for a good long while.

The way Le Carre describes the "secret world" of intelligence work is just incomparable. The details, the jargon (which, in the introduction, he reveals he mostly made up! Incredible!), it's so engrossing, I can't think of a reading experience that approximates it. Except maybe porn.

My personal favorite scene in the story is when Peter Guillam steals the Operation Testify file from the Circus archives. That the archives of Britain's intelligence service are located on a street of shops, next to a coffee shop, and marked as a teacher's entrance for a school or something like that. Not guarded, in the traditional sense, no big barriers around it. Just a door that you'd never notice. Unless of course you'd been told to notice it. That's the essence of Le Carre, and precisely what makes this book so damn great.