The MagazineSquare’s RootsAs the Cold War ended, the compass went haywire.Jan 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 16
• By JOSEPH BOTTUM
 There was a time when John le Carré mattered, really mattered—back when he seemed a major talent and one of the best observers of our time: the man who had turned genre fiction into literature.  John le Carré (2011) NEWSCOM It started when he produced The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963, built to the 1974 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and reached a crescendo with Smiley’s People (1979). The films helped, of course: the popular Richard Burton movie that Hollywood made from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1965, the James Mason movie that director Sidney Lumet adapted from Call for the Dead in 1966. The widely acclaimed seven-part television miniseries of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for that matter, which the BBC released in 1979, with Alec Guinness playing le Carré’s quiet spymaster, George Smiley. But mostly it was the books—all those volumes from le Carré. The Looking Glass War (1965), A Small Town in Germany (1968), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977): For decades, you could find them on library shelves and used-book tables—dog-eared paperbacks, faded book-club editions—and to pick one up was to fall deep into the strangely placid waters of its agitated plot. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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