John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel

I think No Country or The Road are much better starting points. McCarthy's style takes some warming up to, especially regarding the terse run-on sentences and his strict lack of punctuation or indication of the speaker during dialogue.

Blood Meridian is a heavy and dense book that is a difficult enough read even after you are somewhat used to his unique style and tone (desolate, gut-wrenching, violent, quasi-mythical, beautiful). I also think it somewhat undeservedly overshadows his other work when it comes to internet discussions.

I was an avid Ludlum reader in my youth and recently revisited them. I was blown away by the cultural shift since then. His protagonists spends half the books arranging to use payphones and rent cars in an anonymous way. I can't tell if the job has got easier or harder since those largely stopped being possible.

I always recommend The Dogs of War as a first Forsyth novel, and No Comebacks as a first Forsyth reader.

No Comebacks:

1. Are all short stories, so good for the reader who is not yet invested in Forsyth

2. Starts with the titular story, which (IMO) is a pretty good capture of Forsyth plot and story-telling.

Complete tangent, but does anyone remember the online puzzle ‘in from the cold’ or its follow-up ‘torment?

It’s what got me into cryptography many years ago - only two people ever completed ‘in from the cold’ if I remember correctly, and nobody completed ‘torment’ but the creator grngecko got hacked/doxed by someone trying to solve ‘torment’ and took them both offline :(

I really liked the book, and recommend it wholeheartedly, with the note that one should have some good knowledge about the cold war to understand it.

I do not agree with the review though. Spoilers ahead. The novel isn't about "about a lasting, even defiant humanism in the face of battling ideologies". The humanism wasn't very lasting or defiant. The most likeably and humanist character -- the pretty jewish girl, was brutally murdered at the berlin wall after all of her dreams were mercilessly destroyed. The other character figured out what was happening to him, but wasn't much defiant, he just played his part like a good soldier even after he knew he was being betrayed and used to kill innocent people. It is a good book, but a very sad one, with a brutal unhappy ending.

But the really scary thing about this novel is something I understood only after reading it for a second time. While the ending was horrible and unhappy from the point of view of ordinary people like me, it was really meant to be a happy ending from the point of view of people that matter -- i.e., Le Carre's bosses at the various spy agencies and the English upper class.

After all it has England winning. And England wins in a very English way, by being smart, calculating, duplicitous, nasty and ruthless and completely free of any higher principles. And especially free of humanism. In other words, very similar to the way England conquered and ruled half the world.

I bet the English upper classes loved to see how nasty and ruthless their spy agencies were and the spy agencies loved how they were portrayed in the novel.

Even the death of the pretty girl is justified if one looks upon it with the logic of the English ruling class. She was after all, a traitor. She was born and raised in England and yet was a communist. Le Carre portrays her very sympathetically as a misguided idealist, but kills her off after all.

Thus I do not agree with the other part of the review, and the usual treatment Le Carre gets. And that is that Le Carre is some kind of dissident showing the bad side of intelligence services against their wishes. I am sure, the book got the full blessing of Mi 6 top brass, if it was not directly ordered by them.

Don't get me wrong, I think Le Carre was a brilliant writer, but on more careful consideration I am pretty sure some of his early works were not the dissident works the entire literary community pretends them to be but straight up public relations for the MI 6.

His next novel, the looking glass war, confirms my suspicions. It is about some government department other than the Circus (which is Le Carre's code name for MI 6) tries to do some spying for themselves independently of the Circus. The upper levels of government fund them because they do not want all the spying competence to be concentrated in one department. Well, that other department fails utterly because of lack of experience, professionalism, training, etc. The moral of the entire story is that the government should not let other departments do any spying, but they should give all the spying missions and all the money to the Circus (i.e., MI 6).

To Le Carres credit, his later novels that I read are genuinely subversive, revealing some uncomfortable truths about power. It seems that after the iron curtain fell, he had much more freedom of speech.