Finished: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ( le Carre). Another thriller I couldn't put down! Although, it wasn't quite as fast paced as Gone Girl...and it was more espionage spy stuff rather than thriller, I really liked it! Now, I really want to see the movie that was out last year. :-) Set, from what I could tell, in the late sixties, heading into the seventies, the book is about a British spy, George Smiley, who has been forced to retire after his good friend and closet ally, and "Control", the head of the British spy network, has died. Smiley is asked by a select group of former spy people to come back and investigate the possibility of a mole in the British spy network (called the Circus), because an agent has come in from the field claiming to have met a Russian spy who he got to know, and whose diary he has. Before she was beaten and dragged back to Russia, she wanted to defect and work for British intelligence. The field agent, Ricki Tarr, who has been erratic in the past, is desperate to make her a deal so he messages the new top dog at the British agency, Percy Alleline. The new top dog has three right hand men, Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase and Roy Bland. Before the Russian agent, Irina, can be snapped up and given protection, somehow the word leaks out to the Russians and that's when she's sent home and ultimately executed. The diary, however, gives specific details of a deep cover Russian spy in the Circus known only to the Russians as Gerald. Also...there was an incident recently in which a deep cover field agent, Jim Prideaux, has been given a top secret mission in Czechoslovakia...to get information from a top general who knows the name of a Russian spy in the British organization. When Prideaux gets to the rendezvous, he is ambushed and is shot in the back. He is eventually recovered by the Brits and told to go into retirement and forget everything that just happened. Ergo, because of both of these recent developments...the new handful of people who contact George Smiley are certain that one of the top four guys has been working as a deep cover Russian spy for years. Smiley and the handful, including a young agent named Peter Guillam, work quickly and quietly to look at all the old documentation they can. This requires a few tense, but nicely written scenes of stealing old reports from the archives, etc. Smiley interviews many "old" agents who have been "retired", but who have specific details about Operation Testify, the failed Czech mission. It's nerve-wracking and exciting to read as you try and figure things out yourself while Smiley gets closer and closer after each person he talks to! Meanwhile, Jim Prideaux is now working as a teacher at a boy's school and is well-liked. Smiley tracks him down. Prideaux is the last piece of the puzzle; he needs to hear about the details of the mission in Czechoslovakia to put a name to the mole. As it turns out, "Control", Smiley's old best friend and boss sent Prideaux to do this top-secret mission without letting anyone else know, or so he thought, because he had figured out there was a Russian spy in their organization, he just didn't know which of the top guys it was! He even had Smiley on the list of possible candidates. So...what Prideaux was supposed to do was come back with one word, and one word only, from the Czechoslovakian general which would identify the mole. No matter what happened, if Prideaux was captured or anything, he had to somehow signal the "Control" with this one word, even if it meant scribbling it on the outside of a Czech prison. The pre-arranged code words were based on an old children's poem:

Tinker
Tailor
Soldier
Sailer
Rich Man
Poor Man
Beggerman
Thief.

Alleline was to be Tinker, Haydon to be Tailor, Bland to be Soldier. They skipped sailor because it sounded too much like tailor. Esterhase was to be poorman and Smiley was to be beggerman. (I don't know why they didn't use rich man). Anyway...it all became a moot point when Prideaux was ambushed. When you find out in the end, though, who the mole is, it is very sad because he's the person who recruited Prideaux when they were both in college and they'd been very close friends! So, don't read any further if you don't want to know who the mole was. Seriously, stop right now.



The mole ends up being Bill Haydon, who had also been a very good friend of Smiley's! He's the most well-liked of the agents and, though he's probably an obvious choice, it's still a shock. Actually, most shocking would have been for the mole to turn out to be Smiley himself. :-) I gave that some serious thought...that Smiley would spend the entire book finding out if anyone could actually identify him as the mole and then disappear into the night...but then I nixed that idea; Smiley was too innately good. Anyway...as it turns out, Haydon was extremely patriotic and loved his country. However, early on in "the Circus" he realized that the real power/spy struggle was between America and Russia...that England was just a blip on the map and even completely doing away with their agency or exploding all their resources wouldn't make a dent in the world power struggle. (These were his thoughts, not mine.) So...he decided he needed to throw his weight behind one of the two big superpowers for the good of the world, and he chose Russia. He hated America and everything it stood for. So, that ends up being the explanation. He says he never gave anything to the Russians that would truly hurt England...it was all about trying to gather intelligence to trade with the U.S. and then give THAT to Russia. To save face, the British intelligence group is all set to have Haydon sent to Russia to spend the rest of his days. However, he mysteriously ends up with his neck twisted broken the day before he's supposed to leave. Then, they flash to Jim Prideaux back at the boy's school and teaching the boys. I can only assume that Prideaux was the one to exact his revenge!

Another good book! I may have to read some more le Carre at some point! I'm definitely going to see the movie now with Gary Oldman and Colin Firth!!