This week I managed to scrimp and save enough time to finish reading John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (author’s site | amazon.com). Long story short? I liked it a lot.

The novel is a spy thriller so, predictably enough, the plot is one of the book’s centerpieces. The action moves forward at a brisk pace and the plot is both concrete and intricate: satisfying all around. However, when I say the plot moves forward at a brisk pace I do mean brisk–events move at a speed that is fast even when compared to other plot-driven novels. The story does not waste any time on introductory material, and the action begins on page one. Fortunately, the story is damned fun to read, and every event later proves to have ramifications far beyond what is first suspected by the reader and the characters. Far too often in any genre, action is offered up as an end instead of a means. This book avoids that trap.

Le Carré gets away with plunging immediately into the action, without any time wasted on detours and infodumps, in part because this novel takes place in the “real” world. Thus there is no need for him to explain an arbitrary system of magic to the reader, or tell why dark elves have been hated and feared for the last 1,000,000,000 years, or describe how faster-than-light travel works and why the space-spores brought plagues to America and China but missed Australia until 2045. In fact, due to the specificity of the story’s setting (primarily East and West Berlin, just after WWII) and the iconic us’s and them’s of the Cold War that every reader is still intimately familiar with, le Carré’s main challenge is to effectively convey the realities (or a convincing, entertaining substitute, in any case) of the world of espionage, while simultaneously developing his characters.The style of the novel’s prose perfectly matches the peculiar challenges of the story le Carré is attempting to tell, and it is fundamental to the story’s success. Written with great distance, rarely intruding into the internal thoughts of any of the characters, Le Carré treats the people in his novel almost as chess pieces (even Alec Leamas, the “hero”). Everything is surface and action; meaning comes only later. It is as though a fog exists, separating intent, action, and meaning from each other, the characters, and the reader. Distance, cold and calculating, is not just a trait of Leamas or his foes across the iron curtain. Instead, it is the most basic attitude of the text. For large portions of the story, the reader is left to wonder what the reality of the situation is: who is playing what roles, and why?Just before the novel truly ends, the intricate details of the plot are resolved and, with few exceptions, everything that has happened over the course of the novel becomes crystal clear. However, a new question–a moral one–is raised, and any resolution of that question lies entirely within the mind of the reader. Le Carré balances his final metaphysical uncertainty with a stunning, concrete finish that, taken together with the whole, leaves the reader guessing not the story but themselves. And that’s just plain good writing.Do yourself a favor: check the novel out from your local library. It’s relatively famous, so most should have a copy lying around. It’s well worth the time, for pretty much any reader. It delivers, and delivers well, on levels diverse enough to satisfy pretentious effete snobs of literature and mindless, eager devourers of action alike. Most of us, who fall in the middle, are the lucky ones–twice the enjoyment, in one small package.