Nearly two decades ago, in Call for the Dead, John le Carre introduced us to George Smiley and began, along with Len Deighton, a reformation and exaltation of the spy novel as a literary genre. In Smiley's People, the latest and last of Smiley's labyrinthian confrontations with his Russian counterpart Karla, le Carre both completes an epic story and reveals the temporal limits of his chosen form.

Smiley has been with us for so long now that it is difficult to appreciate the huge change le Carre wrought on what had generally—and rightly—been considered an escapist genre….

[Compared to James Bond's "cowboy" idealism and disdain for organizational processes], George Smiley—"breathtakingly ordinary" in the words of his regularly unfaithful wife—was a shock. Or would have been, had he been much noticed. But Call for the Dead did not sell well in America; a country glumly...