John Le Carré suggested reading order - where to begin

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Was recently gifted all John Le Carrés novels and am looking for any opinions on reading order.

I enjoyed the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie, but when searching around the internet, I find only marginally readable suggestions for the reading order. All of which are pages of slop written like a fucking recipe and all of which seem filled with spoilers. God the internet fucking sucks now.

I realize that the novel aren't all related, nor are they sequential but I wondered if any JLC fans here had any opinions on where to begin?
 
I'd say read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People first: they're the most popular, so you'll be in a position to discuss them if that's something you're into, plus I think they're the most popular for a reason, so if you don't take to them, you're probably not going to like any of the others much. After that, dip in and out as you please: what you like is probably going to depend more on you than anything else. I personally like his first two books, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality: they're the first to feature and establish the character of George Smiley, and it's interesting seeing what changes and what doesn't when you get into the Karla Trilogy (Tinker, Tailor; Schoolboy and Smiley's People) which follows Smiley very closely. I'd call out The Looking Glass War and A Perfect Spy as highlights, too, but again, this is just one cunt's opinion. I even have an only semi-justifiable fondness for The Secret Pilgrim, even though it's a fanservicey collection of odds-and-ends that only an author with an established audience could get away with putting out.
 
CaptainAutism69 dijo:
Is that TV series made by the BBC any good?
Presiona para expandir...
I like it better than the 2011 film in many ways, but nothing compares to the novel for me. In particular, I think that Alec Guinness’s Smiley is a bit too terse and unkind. Book Smiley is certainly shown as being occasionally annoyed and frustrated, but always extremely apologetic and regretful when his temper gets the best of him. Guinness didn’t quite embody Book Smiley’s gentle nature and healthy sense of the ridiculous - he often came off as pompous, which Smiley never was, and rude, which Smiley definitely never was. Oldman was better at balancing annoyance and anger with outward good manners.
 
If it's the one I'm thinking of, his novel A Most Wanted Man is to be avoided. It essentially existed as a chance for Le Carré to rant about Bush and the Iraq War. Now personally, I don't care about what someone thought about that war, but Le Carré's sperging made the novel borderline unreadable.

There's a speech delivered by a character near the end that goes on for pages which is obviously Le Carré standing there yelling at the reader. It was a monologue so long that Ayn Rand herself would have read it and said, "My guy, I think you can cut this speech down a bit."

I'd say it was the most unreadable spy genre novel ever written, but Normal Mailer's Harlot's Ghost wins it hands down.
 
Zykon C dijo:
If it's the one I'm thinking of, his novel A Most Wanted Man is to be avoided. It essentially existed as a chance for Le Carré to rant about Bush and the Iraq War. Now personally, I don't care about what someone thought about that war, but Le Carré's sperging made the novel borderline unreadable.

There's a speech delivered by a character near the end that goes on for pages which is obviously Le Carré standing there yelling at the reader. It was a monologue so long that Ayn Rand herself would have read it and said, "My guy, I think you can cut this speech down a bit."

I'd say it was the most unreadable spy genre novel ever written, but Normal Mailer's Harlot's Ghost wins it hands down.
Presiona para expandir...
I just relooked up the name of the series and it's The Night Manager
Red flags are
It was produced by the BBC
It was reviewed on the front page of the BBC website
I read that they genderswapped the spymaster and Le Carre creamed himself about how incredible that was
 
The Night Manager miniseries isn't completely shit IMO. It has its pros and cons:

Cons:
  • Exactly one (1) white man is allowed to be a good guy, and that, of course is Tom Hiddleston as the main character. Everyone who's helping him is either a nig, a wog or a woman (this is where the genderswapping of his handler comes in), and every other posh white dude is required to be an Evil Bastard. This, of course, means that the BBC didn't even have the courage of its pathetic, self-loathing convictions: "Of course we need lots of Representation™, but we can't ask a woman or an ethnic to play a bad guy, that would be ever so beastly. Also, the star still has to be a white man or it won't sell."
  • The message of the novel — that the international arms trade is too big and too lucrative for proper controls to ever get paid more than lip service — is chucked out so the good guy can win and Hiddleston can get paid to make an audition tape to play James Bond one day.
Pros:
  • Olivia Colman is actually pretty good as the genderswapped handler/controller.
  • Hugh Laurie is excellent as always, and the supporting cast is good, especially Tom Hollander.
  • OK, the message is butchered in favour of spy action and derring-do, but maybe you like spy action and derring-do?
  • Elizabeth Debicki gets naked in a couple of episodes.
 
Última edición:
The second run of The Night Manager was utter twaddle, but twaddle that made the sensible decision to

not have actually killed off Hugh Laurie's Bond villain character. They should have made it six straight hours of him hanging around bars in Colombia rambling in villainous fashion, while Hiddleston goes 'hmm, yes, that's very interesting' occasionally.
 
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