Yea, I had the good fortune of reading it in a class in school where we went through a number of spy thriller books as a genre exercise. Reading it alongside so

Yea, I had the good fortune of reading it in a class in school where we went through a number of spy thriller books as a genre exercise. Reading it alongside something like the original Casino Royale by Ian Fleming is a really interesting pairing. In some ways, it's similar to other splits in genre - Neuromancer vs. Snow Crash, Agatha Christie vs. Conan Doyle. Neither is objectively better, but they both set the tone of the genre for the next century. Both Fleming and Le Carre had experienced real-world spycraft, and so their competing visions of fiction both had the pedigree of realism, but applied in different ways and with different worldviews.