El Espia que surgio del frio. (El espía no vuelve) (urspr publ 1963; utgåvan 2014)

4.5 stars. Review to come ( )

> John Le Carré : L'espion qui venait du froid (Gallimard).
Se reporter au compte rendu de André MARISSEL
In: Revue Esprit Nouvelle série, No. 334 (1) (JANVIER 1965), pp. 281-283… ; (en ligne),
URL : https://esprit.presse.fr/article/andre-marissel/john-le-carre-l-espion-qui-venai...

> L'espion qui venait du froid, Un pur espion, La Taupe... Les livres qui ont fait la gloire de John Le Carré… ; (en ligne),
URL : https://amp-lefigaro-fr.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.lefigaro.fr/livres/le-directe...
Décédé à l'âge de 89 ans, le romancier britannique laisse derrière lui vingt-cinq ouvrages au succès colossal. L'ancien employé du MI6 a vu une grande partie de son œuvre adaptée au cinéma.
Maître britannique du roman d'espionnage et auteur au succès aussi bien critique que public, John le Carré est décédé à l'âge de 89 ans. Durant sa longue carrière, l'écrivain a publié 25 livres, qui se sont écoulés à quelque 60 millions d'exemplaires dans le monde entier. Voici un choix non exhaustif de ses œuvres les plus admirées, pour la plupart adaptées sur grand écran, depuis le début d ses débuts en 1961 jusqu'en 2011.

> La revue de presse (Le Figaro et AFP agence) - Publié le 14/12/2020
Le troisième roman de Le Carré, écrit alors qu'il travaillait encore pour les services secrets britanniques, a rencontré instantanément le succès.
Grand roman de la guerre froide, il raconte comment Alec Leamas, un agent britannique du MI6 approchant de la retraite, est incité à traverser le Mur séparant Berlin-Est de Berlin-Ouest, pour une dernière mission.
Pour l'adaptation au cinéma du livre en 1965, Richard Burton endossa le rôle principal.

Out in the Cold
Review of the Pan Books paperback edition (1964) of the Victor Gollancz hardcover original (1963)

I re-read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold due to the recent passing of novelist John le Carré (penname of David Cornwell) (October 19, 1931 – December 12, 2020). His passing brought back memories of my first reading his Cold War novels in the 1970s. Those were probably the first books of somewhat 'serious' writing that I had ever read, after developing an early love of reading with detective and science fiction novels in my teenage years. I had saved all of those paperbacks as well, so it seemed like a good time for some retrospective re-reads.

The Spy... was Carré's breakthrough novel as it portrayed the secret armies of the Western allies acting as amorally & cynically as the supposed villains of the Communist East. The out-to-pasture agent Leamas is given one last shot at an operational role which requires him to method-act his way to appearing as a possible English traitor for the Soviet Bloc recruiters. He himself does not know the true target of the deception until it dawns on him towards the very end. By that time he is too world-weary and repulsed to carry on and makes his own decision about his fate.

The Spy... is tagged as #3 in the series of Carré's perpetual character George Smiley, who is the right-arm of Control, the code-named head of the Circus (Carré's nickname for MI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service). The Smiley character makes only a few cameo appearances though. Regular readers may be pre-conditioned with a few key descriptive words (raincoat, short, plump, spectacles, frog-like) to seeing him perhaps lurking anonymously in the shadows throughout:

Some way down the road – not far, twenty yards, perhaps a bit more – stood the figure of a man in a raincoat, short and rather plump. He was leaning against the railings of the park, silhouetted in the shifting mist. As Leamus approached, the mist seemed to thicken, closing in around the figure at the railings, and when it parted the man was gone. - excerpt from pgs. 37-38.

The little sad man with spectacles who sat alone at the neighbouring table, deep in a book on the manufacture of ball bearings, might have deduced, had he been listening, that Leamas was indulging a sadistic nature […] - excerpt from pg. 52.

As they pushed their way through the revolving glass door, Leamas looked back. Standing at the newspaper kiosk, deep in a copy of the Continental Daily Mail, stood a small, frog-like figure in glasses, an earnest, worried little man. He looked like a civil servant. Something like that. - excerpt from pg. 73.

The Spy... was as effective now as ever and has lost none of its power of portraying the morality of the individual vs. the powers of the state. Although I plan to continue my revisit through the Carré canon, I'll likely make an early jump to the late addition "A Legacy of Spies" (2017) which revisits the Leamas affair through the eyes of an aging Peter Guillam, disciple of George Smiley.

Trivia and Link
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was adapted into a film in 1965 directed by Martin Ritt with a screenplay by Paul Dehn & Guy Trosper and starring Richard Burton as Leamas. I couldn’t find an original trailer for it, but this montage trailer (2015) is very atmospheric with its use of more recent music (Iguazu from the soundtracks of the movie Babel & the TV series Deadwood) by Gustavo Santaolalla. ( )

ok, didn't like the ending

After reading Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy I wanted to read more of le Carre, but I was disappointed with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I will grant that it was written in the 60s, and probably defined the spy novel genre, but reading it, it felt cliched or done-before.

Spoilers:
I am ok with unhappy endings in books and movies, but the ending in this book left me disappointed. ( )