The espionage novel has become a characteristic expression of our time … and John le Carré is one of the handful of writers who have made it so. The fact that this form of writing has assumed this importance tells us something essential about ourselves….

Smiley's People is such a book, and what it tells us is clear enough: that we are now engaged in an intense dialectical process; that the terms on which the process operates have no regard for traditional human values except as points of leverage, and that the goal toward which the process tends is synthesis. We move, inevitably, toward a merger with that which we oppose: Karla begins to resemble Smiley and that resemblance is his downfall, because Smiley has begun to resemble Karla—which is Smiley's own downfall in another way. If this is the end of the Smiley stories (and the author...