Le Carré's Masterpiece

This book is, in my opinion, Le Carré’s masterpiece. There is no such thing as the perfect novel, but Tinker, Tailor comes frighteningly close.
At its heart, it is a whodunnit. There’s a mole inside the British intelligence service, and the simple question is: who is it? (Incidentally, the term "mole" is attributed to Le Carré.)

In Le Carré’s world, there are no heroes — only people. People with flawed characteristics. Troubled. Outcast. Proud. Self-satisfied. Burned out.
In a subtle way, Le Carré brings his characters to life and paints a plot of deceit and betrayal in a profoundly human manner. Beautiful prose, compact and to the point. Le Carré needs only a single page to create an entire world. (Many fantasy authors could learn from that.)

Le Carré makes extensive use of highly specific jargon, often invented by himself, without explaining it. He expects the reader to pick up on its meaning. No spoon-feeding. The outlines are sketched by Le Carré, but as a reader, you often have to fill in the details yourself. Connect the dots. Through flashbacks and shifting points of view, Le Carré completes the puzzle.

What remains at the end is a sense of melancholy and pure admiration for the mastery of the grandmaster of the spy thriller.