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Let me start by noting that my opinion of this book isn’t particularly novel: «The book received a mixed-to-negative critical response, which le Carré credits t

Let me start by noting that my opinion of this book isn’t particularly novel: «The book received a mixed-to-negative critical response, which le Carré credits to readers being upset that the book presented blatantly incompetent and largely unsympathetic characters. Writing in 2013, le Carré said that his "readers hated me for it"» It’s a book about a bunch of idiots bungling stuff. Perhaps if I was in the IC or had come of age during the dusk of the empire I’d get its alleged biting satire, but otherwise it’s just very slow moving, without compelling characters or a particularly interesting or intelligent plot.

reitzensteinm 6y ago
(Spoilers obviously) I didn't enjoy reading The Looking Glass War, but it stuck with me in a big way. A lot of the other novels are about intricate chess games, where you spend the time waiting for the other shoe to drop that clicks everything in to place. TLGW continues with the format, but the other shoe just never drops. There's no payoff. The novel ends. That's a shit thing to read, and I'll never reread it. But it makes the rest of the novels more bleak and sinister. You get the feeling that while the author is focusing on the Smileys and Karlas of the world and the games they play, TLGW is what happens when normal people take the reins without interference - and that's the norm. It's the author pulling away the veneer of glamor around the world of spying that he's intricately built up. That's just my interpretation, though. It could just be a shit novel.
- andyjohnson0 6y ago
  (spoilers) That's basically my reading of it too. Almost everyone is incompetent or deluded, there are no heroes, and in the end Leiser is simply abandoned for reasons that are basically squalid and dishonourable. That this end happens fairly abruptly and we never discover his fate presumably reflects the reality of espionage. According to Wikipedia [1], le Carre said that he wrote the book to satirise the idea of spying as a romantic endeavour, and British nostalgia for ww2. He also said that he regarded it as one of his most authentic works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War
  - peteretep 6y ago
    It’s basically the fucking fly episode in breaking bad
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil gives a fairly detailed account of what it's like to be an intelligence officer (in his case for the CIA) - you are basically identifying people who have useful information and then persuading them to do that, by whatever means necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)

reitzensteinm 6y ago

(Spoilers obviously) I didn't enjoy reading The Looking Glass War, but it stuck with me in a big way. A lot of the other novels are about intricate chess games, where you spend the time waiting for the other shoe to drop that clicks everything in to place. TLGW continues with the format, but the other shoe just never drops. There's no payoff. The novel ends. That's a shit thing to read, and I'll never reread it. But it makes the rest of the novels more bleak and sinister. You get the feeling that while the author is focusing on the Smileys and Karlas of the world and the games they play, TLGW is what happens when normal people take the reins without interference - and that's the norm. It's the author pulling away the veneer of glamor around the world of spying that he's intricately built up. That's just my interpretation, though. It could just be a shit novel.

andyjohnson0 6y ago
(spoilers) That's basically my reading of it too. Almost everyone is incompetent or deluded, there are no heroes, and in the end Leiser is simply abandoned for reasons that are basically squalid and dishonourable. That this end happens fairly abruptly and we never discover his fate presumably reflects the reality of espionage. According to Wikipedia [1], le Carre said that he wrote the book to satirise the idea of spying as a romantic endeavour, and British nostalgia for ww2. He also said that he regarded it as one of his most authentic works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_War
- peteretep 6y ago
  It’s basically the fucking fly episode in breaking bad
- arethuza 6y ago
  Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil gives a fairly detailed account of what it's like to be an intelligence officer (in his case for the CIA) - you are basically identifying people who have useful information and then persuading them to do that, by whatever means necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)