Hundred Book Challenge #6: "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John Le Carre

It's the anti James Bond or Jason Borne.

We tend to romanticize spies but in the end they are just professional liars.

Recently, I started questioning why we make heroes out of certain groups of people based on occupation. Solders, police, fire fighters and spies. Maybe it's some sort of fantasy. There are some things to say about these people- they do save lives.

Still when you look into the lives of these people you come to the depressing realization that they are just normal people and that is kind of bad thing because you don't want these people to be normal. You want them to be better than that.

My time as a reporter showed me that police, solders and fire fighters are not special people. They make stupid human mistakes like everyone the only thing is their stupid mistakes can ruin people's lives.

In “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” We see Leamas, a British operative in charge of handling all the double agents from East Germany shortly after the building of the Berlin Wall, but they are being discovered and killed so Leamas is told to become a double agent himself by effectively ruining his life and reputation to the point where the communists come to him.

To say more would be spoilers but this story is full of twists and turns and I honestly didn't know how it would end until I read the last paragraph. Without giving much away (in other words... spoilers) you don't know if Leamas will live or die and, more to the point, which would be worse.

There isn't action or adventure in this book. Instead we get an accurate portrait of the moral inexactness of Cold War era spying and government in general.

To quote the protagonist, “What do you thing spies are: Priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”

There is no good side or bad side here. London, representative of Christians, Capitalism and freedom is just as guilty of atrocity to the world in general and to poor old Leamas specifically as the Communists.

Do the ends justify the means or does that question even mean anything? It's hard to say.

Ironically, this story led me into the cold. After I finished reading it, at about 1:30 in the morning as I sat up next to my sleeping wife, I couldn't sleep for several more hours. It left me shaken and empty, but in that movement it was more successful than any spy story I've encountered. Emotional movement is probably the key to any proper story and as such I appreciate the experience.

I'll have a real hard time enjoying any James Bond films now though.