I read ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, as a standalone novel, without realising that it is to all intents and purposes a sequel to A Call for the Dead, Le Carre’s 1961 debut novel. Reading the novels out of sequence meant that the central plot twist – which I won’t give away here even though I usually very relaxed about spoilers – was kept disguised for much of the novel, even if on reflection it was fairly guessable.

Why read a Cold War spy novel now? Is it in any way still relevant? Certainly the political context of the novel has changed dramatically – when The Spy was first published it had an immediacy and relevance it has now lost. It exposed the dark underside of the world of Cold War espionage, in which each side, East and West, were both morally equivalent and ambivalent, where murder was commonplace, and where the only justification for one’s actions was the final outcome. Now it is just a historically based adventure novel, with as much relevance as The 39 Steps or The Riddle of the Sands.

Alec Leamas runs the Berlin office of the British secret service. Berlin is divided between East and West by the recently constructed Wall (a landmark point was passed recently when the time the Wall has been down became longer than the time it stood).  The novel opens as Leamas’s operation loses its last double agent, shot whilst defecting from East Berlin. Leamas is recalled to London by his boss, ‘Control’ and is given one last mission: to fake his defection to East Germany and to undermine their ruthlessly efficient secret service. There is very little exposition setting all this out – we learn of this plot only gradually as it unfolds.

I am not sure Leamas would have made a convincing potential defector. Yes he is fired, starts drinking, has money problems and serves a short prison sentence. But there are surely flags that this is a trap. He falls into the clutches of the East Germans far too easily. A menial job in a library leads him to meet Liz Gold, who just happens to be secretary of her local cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This obviously isn’t a coincidence – Liz is unknowingly part of the plot. After his release from jail Leamas is approached by an East German recruiter and with little pause for breath he defects and sells all his country’s secrets – or what little he purports to know – for a few thousand pounds.

During his interrogation Leamas mentions British payments to a double agent in the East. This, we later come to understand, is part of the plot to sow discord among the East German spy operation, which culminates in a trial of the Communist spymaster Mundt. During the trial the British plot is exposed when Liz is called as a surprise witness, only for a secret underlying plot, to which Leamas has been oblivious, to be revealed. The novel’s tragic denouement comes swiftly thereafter with a degree of inevitability.

This is a well-written page-turner. Le Carre evokes the seediness of Leamas’s world with very precise prose and imagery:

“They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.”

Although there is a moral ambivalence about the novel’s portrait of espionage, Le Carre still takes sides – he is disgusted by intellectual, moral and actual poverty of the East. Although the world Le Carre portrays is now gone, this didn’t feel like an anachronism (in the way the Buchan and Childers books now do). In part this is because of the enduring popularity of Le Carre’s work to film and television adaptations, which keep it current, and in part due to his cynicism and amorality which is very modern in its sensibility. I am glad I have now read Le Carre – he was a novelist I have skirted around many times but never quite got round to – but I suspect his other spy novels will be very similar to this one. But next time I am looking for a book to help pass a train journey I will know not to overlook Le Carre.