Its ongoing success and currency reside in this adaptability. Surrounding Smiley is the unstable edifice of the espionage trade: changing notions of empires and nations as new transnational forms appear a spy trade being redefined within the dynamics of historical transformation individual struggles for characters trying to make sense of their work and lives nostalgia for times that modernity has subsumed in the name of progress the increasing incursion of the security state into new areas of public and private life the uncertain relation between truth and deception and the search for a truth of which no one can any longer be certain.įrom the time of its publication to its latest adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has raised and negotiated key issues related to both fictional and real contexts of espionage.

Its central character, George Smiley, pushed from the Circus (fictional British intelligence agency) only to return covertly to investigate a mole at the very top of the organization, is a type of anti-heroic Prometheus figure bringing light to humanity through forms of deceit. Many have discussed the links between representation and reality as a structuring feature of both Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its author, who worked as a spy in his early professional life. The first in the Karla Trilogy, followed by The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy continues the critique expounded in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) to focus upon, not the sexy, triumphant heroism and techno-fetishism of the Bond franchise, but the everyday paranoid underbelly of the secret service. What accounts for the ongoing importance of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in popular culture? First published in 1974, John le Carr é ’s novel has occupied an important place in the espionage imagination ever since, with a BBC television adaptation directed by John Irvin in 1979, BBC radio broadcasts in 1988, 2009 & 2016, and a film directed by Tomas Alfredson in 2011. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy : Adaptations, Histories, Legacies

Bbc radio tinker tailor soldier spy