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A review by lookingglasswar
The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
4.0
The Looking Glass War is like reading the feeling when your car begins to skid. Coming off of the success of the Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carre wanted to showcase a failure. From the very beginning, when a basic exchange of information is failed, you, the reader, a wannabe spy thanks to reading his earlier works, know that something has gone horribly awry. And it keeps happening. The Department is staffed with men who know their time has passed: they are surpassed by the expertise of the Circus and Smiley's men. Cognizant of this, they leap at the chance to make themselves useful to Britain once more, because "while they might be cynical of the qualities of one another, contemptuous of their own hierarchical preoccupations, their faith in the Department burned in some separate chapel and they called it patriotism."
As they rope a former agent into their scheme, it becomes a love story. Avery, the young agent in a crew of old hands, is told to mislead and delude their recruit into thinking that the Department is much more competent than its shabby, sordid reality. Leiser, their operative, essentially falls for the world Avery spins. Le Carre's choice to make their relationship as charged as it is is one I will be thinking about for a while: it looks terrifyingly like love. When Avery begins to doubt his mission and the way he is deceiving Leiser, an old hand tells him "love is whatever you can still betray." And like every Le Carre, the emphasis is on destruction and the ways intent falls short of reality: you knew from the first fucked-up handover that this was never, ever going to turn out well.
At the end, Leiser begs for a token from Avery before he sets off. Avery gives him a photograph of a dead operative's child and pretends it is his own. Thus no person is left untouched by the corrosive deceit: even complete innocents are shuttled into roles according to a higher design. It's nauseating, it's claustrophobic, and it's Le Carre at his best.
As they rope a former agent into their scheme, it becomes a love story. Avery, the young agent in a crew of old hands, is told to mislead and delude their recruit into thinking that the Department is much more competent than its shabby, sordid reality. Leiser, their operative, essentially falls for the world Avery spins. Le Carre's choice to make their relationship as charged as it is is one I will be thinking about for a while: it looks terrifyingly like love. When Avery begins to doubt his mission and the way he is deceiving Leiser, an old hand tells him "love is whatever you can still betray." And like every Le Carre, the emphasis is on destruction and the ways intent falls short of reality: you knew from the first fucked-up handover that this was never, ever going to turn out well.
At the end, Leiser begs for a token from Avery before he sets off. Avery gives him a photograph of a dead operative's child and pretends it is his own. Thus no person is left untouched by the corrosive deceit: even complete innocents are shuttled into roles according to a higher design. It's nauseating, it's claustrophobic, and it's Le Carre at his best.