Le Carre published his first novel, Call For the Dead, in 1961, and his first major novelistic success, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), was turned into a film in 1966, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which also began as a novel, published in 1974, was his first venture into television. He rejected the project of turning it into a film because the plot would have to be compressed in order to fit a feature-length movie, but he thought that the space afforded by TV serialization would do justice to his narrative. He was also impressed with the skill of Arthur Hopcraft's teleplay, which extensively reordered the structure of the novel in order to clarify the narrative for a television audience without violating its essential character (for example, Hopcraft began the narrative with the debacle in Czechoslovakia, which the novel does not treat until chapter 27). Le Carre was even more taken by the interpretation of protagonist George Smiley provided by Alec Guinness. Indeed, as he was writing Smiley's People (1980), Le Carre found himself visualizing Guinness in the role and incorporated some of the insights afforded by the actor in the final part of the trilogy (the second part, The Honourable Schoolboy, 1977, has not been dramatized). A trivial example will stand for many. During the production of Tinker, Tai­ lor, Guinness complained that the characterizing idiosyncrasy of Smiley, polishing his glasses with the fat end of his tie, cannot be done naturally because in London's cold weather, Smiley would wear a three­ piece suit, thus a handkerchief must be substituted for the tie. At the end of Smiley's People, Le Carre includes a teasingly oblique rejoinder: "From long habit, Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was absently polishing them on the fat end of his tie, even though he had to delve for it among the folds of his tweed coat" (emphasis added). Smiley's People was itself dramatized by the BBC, with Alec Guinness reprising the title role to great acclaim, in 1982.

     The story of Tinker, Tailor has an archetypal sim­plicity reminiscent of the Odyssey: the scorned outsider investigates the running of the kingdom, testing the loyalty of his subjects and kin by means of plausible stories before disposing of the usurpers and restoring righteous rule. In Le Carre's modem story, the elements are transposed onto the landscape of conflicted modem Europe in the throes of the Cold War.

     A botched espionage operation in Czechoslovakia ensures that Control (Head of British Intelligence) and his associates are discredited. Shortly after this debacle, Control dies; his able lieutenant Smiley is retired; and the two are succeeded by four operatives they have trained whose codenames are Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Spy: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhaze. Six months later, Riki Tarr, a maverick Far Eastern agent, turns up in London with a story suggesting there is a mole (a deeply concealed double agent) in the Circus (intelligence headquarters, located at Cambridge Circus). Lacon of the Cabinet Office entices Smiley out of retirement to investigate the story. Smiley gradually pieces together the story by analyzing files, interrogating witnesses, and trawling through his own memory and those of other retired Circus personnel, notably Connie Sachs (a brilliant cameo role played by Beryl Reid), until he finally unmasks the mole "Gerald" at the heart of the Circus.

     The mood of the story, however, is far from simple. Duplicity and betrayal, personal as well as public (Smiley's upper-class wife is sexually promiscuous, betraying him with "Gerald"), informs every aspect of the scene. While the traitor is eventually unmasked, the corrupt nature of the intelligence service serves as a microcosm of contemporary England: secretive, manipulative, class-ridden, materialistic, and emotionally sterile. Thus, if the Augean stables have been cleaned, they will soon be soiled again. This downbeat tone accounts for the serial not being taken up by the U.S. networks and marks it off from the charismatic spy adventures of James Bond, but it also accounts for its particular appeal to British middle-brow audiences.

     The spy genre is virtually a British invention: al­ though other countries produce spy writers, the centrality of the genre to British culture is long-standing and inescapable: John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, and Len Deighton, as well as Le Carre, have all achieved international success for their spy stories-not to mention the achievements in television drama by Dennis Potter (The Blade on the Feather) and Alan Bennett (An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution). To account for this obsession with spies, we only have to consider the political circumstances of Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries: a declining imperial power, whose overseas possessions must be ruled and defended more by information than by outright physical force; an offshore island of a divided Europe, seeing itself threatened in the 20th century by German, then Soviet, military ambitions. Perhaps even more significant than these external threats are those from within. Holding a disproportionate share of positions of power in the cabinet, Whitehall, the BBC, and government institutions, the ruling class comprises an elite educated in public schools and at Oxbridge, and such a class, which maintains its grip on power by exclusion, is li­ able to marginalize or demonize those who openly challenge its assumptions. The result is liable to be subversion from within-a tactic fostered by the duplicitous jockeying for power of rival gangs in the enclosed masculine world of the public schools. The symbolic and emotional link between the world of the public school and that of the Circus is established in Tinker, Tailor by the character of Jim Prideaux. This injured and betrayed agent teaches at a prep school after his failed Czech mission and enlists the aid of a hero-worshipping pupil as his watcher. Thus, the fictions that Le Carre invented have their counterpart in the real world and tap  familiar  English  fears and obsessions. In the same  year,  1979,  that saw the serialization of Tinker, Tailor, the BBC also produced two documentary series, Public School and Spy, that reinforced the connections between real events and Le Carre's work. An episode in the latter series, "The Climate of Treason," concerned  itself with speculating about the identity of the "Fourth Man" (a fourth double agent within MI5, after Burgess, Maclean, and Philby). On November 15, 1979, Margaret Thatcher publicly identified the art historian Sir Anthony  Blunt,  Surveyor  of  the Queen's Pictures (curator of the royal collection), as the Fourth Man, recruited by the Russians in  the 1930s while at Cambridge. Le  Carre's  novel  was read as a fictionalized version of these events.

     The success of Tinker, Tailor lies in its realism, which is portrayed not only in the characters (and Guinness's Smiley is as definitive a performance as Sir Laurence Olivier's Richard in Richard Ill or Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell) but also in the serial's depiction of the way intelligence institutions work. How­ ever, the claim for realism must not be pressed too far; Le Carre has admitted that he invented much of the vocabulary used in the novel-babysitters, lamplighters, the Circus, the nursery, moles-though he was also amused to discover that real agents appropriated some of his terms once the stories were published. Moreover, much intelligence work is bureaucratic and boring: Smiley's reflections turn the drudgery of reading files into a fascinating intellectual puzzle that, unlike the real experience, always produces significant information.

     At the symbolic level, however, the portrayal of the workings of bureaucracy is authentic: bureaucracies serve those who govern by gathering, processing, and controlling access to information. In a world increasingly governed by means of information, those who control it have power and wealth, so that the resonance of Le Carre's story will carry beyond the Cold War setting that is its point of departure.