The Looking Glass War
by John le Carre
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Book Summary Information
Author: John le CarreEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-03-01
ISBN: 0743431707
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780743431705
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Looking Glass War
Book Review: A profound anatomy of moral deterioration
Summary: 4 Stars
As a complete book, "The Looking Glass War" isn't perhaps one of Le Carre's crowning achievements. But in its specific anatomy of the human deterioration, moral depravity and sometimes inhumanness of the cold war it is one of his deepest studies. If "The Spy who came out from the Cold" and "Smiley's People" are symphonies, then this is a tight piece of chamber music. It could have been tighter -- cutting off about a forth of the book would have improved it -- but it offers a hermetic, very troubling experience. It is less about suspense and action and more about relations, morality and compassion. For my part, it is the one book of Le Carre's that remained with me and troubled me the longest. If you liked the more serious aspects of Le Carre's work, then this one will engage you. If you enjoy his work mostly for the action and suspense, however, this one may come on as a little tedious.
Albeit a cameo by Smiley (in one of his least attractive moments), the characters are mostly new. The plot itself is simple: a small, practically defunct British spy agency with a mandate for military targets that has been lagging on aimlessly since WWII, gets one more shot at mounting an intelligence operation. WWII was their best of times, the source of their pride and nostalgia: since then, stripped from financing, backwards on technology, they are no more than a bureaucratic specter. But the gods of warfare reward their zealots, and out of the blue, the agency is offered to retrieve some crucial information about military installations beyond the iron wall (I'll be stingy with details so as not to spoil too much). Everybody wakes up. As they do not have even a single operational agent (nor a radio, weapons, vehicles etc.), they must recruit one, hastily train and employ him; but they need to constantly lie to him, else he might realize how reduced they have become. The relations between the agency's personnel -- the washed-out old hand, the eager young assistant, the ambitious chief -- and the agent, Leiser (codename Mayfly) is what the book is mostly about.
Le Carre, of course, never quite revels to us why Leiser accepts his role (it was mostly a mistake to be heavy-handed about that, as in the subpar "The Night Manager.") Little by little, hints are dropped. A naturalized Pole, dapper, womanizer, Leiser is in fact in desperate need of discipline in his life. An extremely lonely man, the small circle of old-hand spymasters around him supply him with a sense of belonging, friendship, perhaps even love (at a certain point, young Avery realizes that he is being played by his superiors quite as Leiser is. His job is to have Leiser like, possibly love him; and he does.) One of the more pathetic portions of the book is the 48-hours leave that Leiser is granted during his training. While all are certain that this "ladies' man" is having the time of his life, he in fact roams London streets aimlessly, dissipating the time until he can return to the ad-hoc training facility (a house in Oxford rented for one month). What Leiser otherwise wants, is to be thoroughly English. He is insulted to the extent of rage when his colloquialisms are corrected by the jolly but insensitive cockney radio trainer, Johnson. He craves Englishness. It is something I wholly do not understand myself, but Le Carre is effective in convincing us that such a passion exists. It is beyond merely belonging, it is becoming.
So much is Leiser involved in his new life, that his common sense does not reveal to him the amateur nature of the preparations. The radio technology he is expected to use is outdated, cumbersome and easy to intercept; there is no clear plan of action, really, except for getting him in; certainly no one gives serious thought how to get him out. The readers suspect this since a totally mundane assignment that Avery embarked on earlier, which was botched for lack of preparation and professionalism, is praised by his superiors as a success; so utterly afraid of facing their own incompetence they have lost that all-important ability of learning from mistakes.
The Circus, their rival agency where Smiley works, of course realizes this. firmly in the grasp of Control, with Smiley as his lieutenant and sometimes conscience, the Circus observes and keeps its distance (in terms of Le Carre continuity, the story takes place in the mid-sixties, before Smiley's first retirement). However, neither Control nor Smiley will deny the specter team the rope that they require to hang their own agent when everything, of course --
[SPOILER ALERT BEGINS!] --
goes wrong.
There is one point in the book where all of a sudden things turn serious: as Leiser crosses the border (burdened by an old 50-pound radio unit in a suitcase) he quietly and efficiently kills a sentry with a knife. All of a sudden we realize that, his inadequate training notwithstanding, this is a resourceful, dangerous man. This action, however, turns out to be a damning mistake (but why not commit mistakes in contingencies against which he was neither warned nor prepared for?) -- and it is not the last. In fact, in view of the sloppy preparation, Leiser goes much further than one might expect. Still, this is not very far. At that point enters Smiley, gently hinting that the entire operation was redundant, and could and should have been avoided.
This is where Smiley's (as well as the others', save Avery) coldbloodiness plays out: even when it is clear that the operation must be aborted, there is no reason to "play by the war rules" as Lecher "proudly" declares (what a pathetic figure he is reduced to in that scene). For, even if they must relinquish Leiser and abort the operation, they can still give him a head start and a fighting chance to escape. The reason is that the only way that the East-Germans can locate him is through his radio transmissions. Every transmission begins with a brief exchange of identification call signals. At that point, they can signal him to abort transmitting, dump the radio set and attempt to get away. But they don't: when Leiser begins his transmission, there is no one on the other side to receive them. They don't just "disown" him, in Smiley's whitewashed language. They are abandoning him to die when they can still do something for him. He simply doesn't matter anymore, since "we play by the war rules."
[END SPOILER]
This is a book about how people who were once decent and resourceful have deteriorated into coldbloodiness, sheer ambition and becoming all-out technicians who inoculate themselves against the moral implications of their actions. It goes beyond the manipulations that Smiley performs in "The Spy who came out from the Cold." Albeit thin on the action and at times redundant and tedious on the narrative, this is one of Le Carre's most profound studies of the human condition.
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