The Looking Glass War, Le Carre
5.0 Stars
8-1-2025

I can see why the BBC keeps making abridged and poorly performed adaptations of this book; the full and complete version is a nuclear bomb aimed at post-war Britain. Better to neuter the story and hope no one ever notices the full version. While superficially a spy novel, this is really more of a horror story, as empty and damned people stumble through the forms of life on the worst island on earth. At various points it reminded me of The Rehearsal, with its extreme instances of cringe and social awkwardness, of Killers of a Flower Moon, as one branch of the civil service inexorably puts the finishing touches on its extermination of a rival branch of the civil service, and Blade Runner, or at least the bits of it where the MC is left wondering who, if anyone, is a real human being and not a malevolent android. Like Le Carre's A Murder of Quality, this packs a stunning amount of curdled malice into a relatively short book.

If I have one quibble with Le Carre's early work is that people keep breaking out into love poetry at the climax of his books, which doesn't seem entirely true to the characters.