Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is because the novel has entered the subconscious of spy fiction and so many things have been inspired by it intentionally or not that it doesn't seem as fresh as it once did. But at the time, the notion that intelligence work is a dirty game and that everybody follows basically the same rulebook was pretty novel and even shocking. These days this is just generally accepted as true -- even the recent James…
I'm really curious if there's a name for this phenomenon - being unimpressed by something that was a transformative work at the time because of how much it transformed the genre or medium in its image. I often think of The Matrix being a good example of this, both in how it defined the sort of "the world is a computer" trope, but also just action movies for a while. It's still good, but some of the impressiveness of…
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#31I think it's the fact that this is so ubiquitous and normal that no-one has bothered with a name for it yet, except maybe “history”. For my parent's generation, Elvis Presley and The Beatles were something new and revolutionary while for me they represent boring establishment. This is just how things go. “Transformative” only ever holds for a specific moment in history. And human history is nothing but those transformations becoming the new normal.