The Secret Pilgrim
by John le Carré · first published 1990
3mentions
1recommended by
2HN commenters
2016–2022first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
The rules of the game, and of the world, have changed. Old enemies now yield to glasnost and perestroika. The killing shadows of the Cold War are flooded with light. The future is unfathomable. The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is forced by the explosions of change to revisit his secret years. He illuminates the brave past and even braver present of George Smiley, his hero and mentor, who gives b
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I nominate The Secret Pilgrim. It's a sequence of vignettes about the Service as related by Smiley during a training session for new recruits. I remember finishing the book, and feeling a profound sense of pity for the broken, fractured…
on “What is the best John le Carré novel?” ↗For me, it was The Secret Pilgrim. It catches Le Carre at the precise moment when the final scales fell away from his eyes, and he found himself unable to defend even partially the corporatist state that his characters had inhabited…
on “Which Is the Best John Le Carré Novel? (2014)” ↗…were taken away in exchange for removal of the reason they were placed there - which was USA placing missiles in Turkey). As much as the books are fiction, John Le Carre summarised it pretty well in The Secret Pilgrim although from the western PoV (but similar take could be probably pretty much taken about soviets on the average): Smiley muses that the most vulgar thing about the Cold War was that the Western societies…
on “Soviet Military Maps of North America and UK” ↗