I believe I first read "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' in the Reader's Digest abridged version five-and-a-half decades ago. I was in high school and now I have the inestimable pleasure of reading about Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhause, Percy Alleline, Roy Bland, Oliver Laycon, George Smiley and Control while the latest iteration of the Circus grills an eighty-year-old Peter Guillam about what went wrong in Operation Windfall in the early sixties. LeCarre is back and better than ever at eighty-five.
The premise is that heirs of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, both dead on the Berlin Wall in 'Spy', have come after the British government for compensation for the deaths of their parents. They have unearthed some Stasi files and feel that Smiley and Guillam negligently allowed their parents to die decades earlier. Peter uses all of his skills to dodge, weave and generally avoid the inquiries of his inquisitors, lawyers named Bunny, Tabitha and Laura. The lawyers inform Peter that they have found a London safe-house founded by Smiley and somehow, still funded by Treasury, and in it, all the lost Windfall files. Going through the files is a step back in time to the Cold War and the tradecraft of an earlier era. LeCarre ties this history into some of his more famous Smiley books by having Leamas obsessed with the possibility of a mole at the top of the Circus, which of course was the underlying theme of the great Smiley trilogy he wrote in the 70's. Peter concludes the whole process is nonsense, slips off and finds Jim Prideaux, who tells him how to find Smiley. George is highly offended and defends their and the Circus's role in fighting the Cold War, although he ruefully acknowledges that the spies didn't really effect the outcome. I suspect his is LeCarre's epitaph on the events of that era. As always, his books are complex and brilliantly written.
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