"

'I asked you to show me the Smiley way and you showed me. Offered Karla the chance to call it all off.'

I think individual readers' verdict on this continuation of John Le Carré's Smiley series will depend on how you perceive the original books and, therefore, what expectations you carry forward.

If you want an espionage thriller set during the Cold War, then this delivers. It may be both a little slow and, simultaneously, have Smiley taking too much of an active role in comparison with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the book to which this is a sequel and to which it looks back frequently. There are things happening which wouldn't, I think, have taken place in the original JlC books:(view spoiler)[a young woman who works in publisher admin demands to be taken to Control and gets escorted straight to his office; she then goes into the field behind the Iron Curtain with Smiley and Guillam with no training, before going rogue and taking herself off to Hungary; there's a car chase with Smiley at the wheel. There's even a scene where restrained, fastidious Smiley, buys a present for Ann, gets it wrapped with an over-egging of grotesque ribbons and walks off with it proudly under his arm: a travesty of characterisation. (hide spoiler)]

There's some cute tradecraft 'technology' with cellophane, and a 2024 insertion of a swathe of women - conspicuously absent, generally, from the originals apart from Connie Sachs and assorted wives, mothers and daughters as the plots require. There are also some risible similes, in contravention to the original cool, clean writing: 'he looked as disgraceful and salty as Aphrodite coming up out of the sea in the main room of the state museum' and 'they scuttled around him like good Christmas churchgoers around a tramp'.

This also attempts to explain the troubled relationship between Smiley and Anne with a kind of ultimatum at the end which Smiley fails. In lots of ways, then, this is simpler and makes Smiley less enigmatic than in the original series. The 'duel' between him and Karla is also put into plain sight with easy motivations on both sides.

If, like me, you revere John Le Carré for his moral gravitas, his understanding and depiction of ethical compromise and impossible choices, then this book doesn't play in that same space. It looks back at the early 1960s through present eyes and, apart from putting women into a space where they were largely absent in the original books, also makes a nod to present progressive ideas: Connie is willing to bring in people 'who couldn't be 'properly cleared' because they were too Jewish or too Jamaican or too intimate with other women' - just not the way JlC depicted the Circus with its old boy network, class and imperial values which themselves contribute to the overlooking of the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

So this is a decent espionage yarn, for sure - but for me JlC was way more than a thriller writer. His humane vision, political and social commentary, and moral stature gave real literary heft to his books. This is solid entertainment with classy storytelling but doesn't continue the ethical trajectory of its source material. And I'm not really a fan of the infusion of progressive values into a world where JlC was quite clear that the lack of such values was one of the very reasons for the downfall of the Circus, as he showed in his own 21st century retrospective, A Legacy of Spies"