Reviews

• 東西冷戦の一場面を知る。

  ６０年代冷戦真っ最中のイギリス諜報部と東ドイツ諜報部の水面下の戦争。それに利用された諜報員と愛人。今となっては知る由もない５０年前能力ベルリンから３００㎞離れたポーランド国境近くの思想犯収容所に於ける党査問委員会の冷酷な実態。其処に於けるナチスの亡霊、ユダヤ人、共産主義官僚、そしてイギリス人諜報員と愛人。複雑に絡み合いながらの展開が読者を引き付ける。WikipediaやGoogl Earthを駆使すると収容所や、ベルリンの壁を超える位置が分かり現実味が一層ますし、５０年前には全く無かった読書法。時代を感じさせないスパイ物。

• 全く今時ではないスパイ小説

  作者の作品がスパイ小説の古典と知り、購入。 第二次大戦後の東ドイツを舞台にしたスパイ活動のお話。 1963年発表とあって確かに古い作風ですが、今時の派手な戦闘があり沢山の人が死ぬといった展開が無い分、ハードボイルド感が強調され、また登場人物が主人公Leamasを含み少人数でじっくり落ち着いて読めます。 作者の英語も日頃目にしている米語とは違うように感じました。

• Excellent book

  Great collection of books to choose from.

• 東西冷戦下の人間描写が見事

  70年代の冷戦の雰囲気がよくでていました。子供のころウィーンにいた時分を思い出しました。東側を命がけで越境して来る亡命者のニュースを良くテレビでやってました。西側からクレーンを回して脱出を助けたり。それを東側の監視塔から銃撃して来るのです。この本の冒頭とラストにも似たような描写がでてきて思い出しました。

• 孤独な一個人としてのスパイ

  登場人物の数も少なく派手なアクションも殆どない。スパイの日常を淡々と、緻密に描くことによって、冷戦時代の国家間のせめぎ合いやその中で翻弄されていく男女の姿がはっきりと浮かび上がってくる。英語は少し難しいが、先が知りたくてどんどん読み進めることができた。冗長さを感じさせない名作。ただし、Smileyは殆ど登場しない。

• How real the spy world is in the story !

  No one wears a tuxedo in Le Carre’s spy novels. His agents are middle-aged, disappointed, disillusioned men in stained overcoats. In “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” a worn-out English spy named Alec Leamas undertakes a terrifying mission in the hope that it will be his last: He pretends to defect to East Germany, the better to infiltrate the enemy’s espionage network. Undoubtedly “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is a first-rate thriller and more: a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth. The best thing about the book is how real the spy world is in the story and how ugly it is just like in the real world and not like most spy books. Alec Leamas is a very believable character just like every other character in the book, and I was very much attached to Leamas. He may be a drunkard and bastard, but he is a man who has not completely lost human heart. Otherwise the tragedy at the last would not have happened. By the way, Le Carre has not yet forgiven the American government and media, and the British government and media because they took the world to Iraq War under the false pretense that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He has been expressing his angry voices openly whenever he had the chance to do so and not only that he has been taking part in the public demonstrations to the same effect in spite of his age of almost 80. Reading this novel, one can have an impression of a man who doesn’t think that any thinking man can or should genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one, and that the writer has the right, merely on the score of his sensibilities, to shirk the ordinary dirty work of politics.

• これを最初に読むのはつらい

  le carreの有名な作品です。また私が最初に原語で読んだスパイ小説です。ただ決して読みやすい作品ではありません。英語自体が難しいのです。使われている単語がどうこうというのでなく、著者のプロットと描写の組み立て方が日本人にはわかりにくいのでしょう。le carre自身が、sisの出身であるため、この時点では、おそらく作品の抽象性を高めることにより様々なトラブルの種を意識的に避けようとしたのかもしれません。そしてなんともいえない暗い雰囲気が最初から最後まで充満しています。そしてプロット自体が陰湿でなかなか一読しただけではつかめないのです。というわけで私はいまだに、le carreの作品を無条件で薦める人は信用しません。でもその後の作品の中心人物（mundtとsmiley)が何人か登場するという意味では、欠かせない作品なのでしょう。もしかすると、ベルリンの壁もない現代では、別な読み方が必要な作品なのかもしれません。

• 怒濤のような展開と緊迫感

  多くの日本人にとっては、ルカレの英語の表現とプロットは難しい。この小説を読んだ時、前半は面白いというより、しんどかった。しかしその辛抱は、後半の怒濤のような展開と緊迫感によって報われる。読み終えたときの満足感を信じて読んで欲しい。 しかし、娯楽的な要素を持った作家の中で、彼ほど読むのが難しい作家を他には知らない。フォーサイスの作品などを軽く読みこなしている人でも、ルカレは難しい。英語にはかなり自信がある人でも、苦労すると思う。覚悟は必要である。 日本語訳では、題名が｢寒い国から来たスパイ｣となっているが、原題ののColdは、「寒い」という意味ではない。ただ、この日本語訳の題も、雰囲気をうまく醸し出しているので、誤訳なのか、意図的に変えたのかは、私には分からない。

• Attractive

  A quality presentation of a classic

• The spy who came in from the cold

  Eletrizante, Jlc vai contando a estória como estivéssemos dentro dela decidindo. Reli 40 anos depois . Um must. Vamos agora ao flime! Ruy

• holds up

  It’s interesting reading this spy novel some 62 years after its events set in 1963. The Cold War in which its spies struggle is over. The Soviet Union and East Germany are no more. So what does it hold for us, today? Well, first, it’s is gripping story of subterfuge, well-told. Alec Leamas, a long-time British spy and former head of Berlin station, is set up to protect Hans-Dieter Mundt, a high-ranking East German counter spy who has been turned to work for the British. The British plot is cunning, ruthless and also sets up a Liz Gold , a young library worker and member of the British communist party who falls in love with Alec. Both sides play dirty but the novel nevertheless indicates that it’s the democratic side that is more worth defending. The question is whether the trickery really achieves anything and that question is left hanging as it is in most Le Carre novels and very ably by his son Nick Harkaway in the follow-up ‘Karla’s Choice’. What makes the novel work is the carefully drawn and very believable characters. Leamas is taciturn, almost brutish, but he is a brute with guts with a centre that believes in what he is doing even if, he himself, has been tricked, which he has. What is strange to me is that the 1963 that is portrayed feels more like 1955. It has the drabness of the British fifties with no sense of the coming pop revolution that was to follow. It’s often said that the British fifties didn’t end until 1964 when Harold Wilson became prime minister and the Beatles conquered America but still … It suits Le Carre’s theme to have a London that seems as grim as East Berlin. It also suits that young women are still referred to as ‘girls’, whose ideas are at best naive and worst frivolous. LeCarre always had trouble with women and overcoming his vague snobbishness. The dupe Leamas is relentlessly lower middle class and Liz is romantically foolish, both of which suit an old fashioned attitude which is once more gaining ground amidst a dishonest right wing. It’s as much a novel set in the end of an era as it is of the era itself. Communist Europe would remain the same for many years to come and LeCarre’s tale of treachery would still make a good limited series today, a refreshing and perhaps realistic antidote to Bond and ‘Mission Impossible’. The novel’s abiding impression is of the sheer cruelty of the communist east and the repression of the Berlin Wall where people were shot for trying to escape the eastern utopia. It is a reminder of what autocracies are like and of a time that would fit the Russia of today.

• Ends and means...

  Alec Leamas is the head of the West German office of the British Secret Service – the time is the early 1960s, just after the building of the Berlin Wall. His main adversary, Hans-Dieter Mundt, has been successfully eliminating all of Leamas’ agents one by one, and Leamas has just witnessed the death of the last double-agent he had in East Berlin. Called home, Leamas expects he will be retired, but he is asked to stay “out in the cold” for one last operation – to take part in an elaborate sting to infiltrate the East German set-up and bring down Mundt. But first he must establish a convincing cover story for himself, one that will make the East Germans believe that he is willing to betray his country... This is my first le Carré novel, although his books have been adapted so often and he’s been so influential on the genre I felt I had a good idea of what to expect – a bleak, cold portrayal of the work of spies far removed from the glamour of James Bond and his like. And that’s exactly what I got in this slow-burn but engrossing thriller. Le Carré shows a moral equivalence between the agents on both sides of the wall rather than the good Brits/evil enemies portrayal that was more standard in fiction before his time. Both sides are shown as using methods that are murky at best and the question that underpins it is the old one of whether the ends justify the means. To point this up, le Carré introduces an innocent into the story – Liz Gold, a woman with whom Leamas has an affair while building up his false story. She’s an idealist – a communist at a time when the Communist Party in Britain is so minor and insignificant that it’s more like a social club than a revolutionary political force. As the story progresses, she will have to face the reality of communism under a totalitarian government, and Leamas will have to face the consequences of having accidentally put her in a position of great danger. His world weary cynicism contrasts with her naive belief in humankind. Her love for Leamas and faith in him will force him to reconsider the methods and morality of the organisation of which he has been a part for so long. The writing style is in line with the character of Leamas – unemotional and somewhat cynical. It takes a long time to work out quite what’s going on, not just for the reader but for the characters too, since it’s full of bluff and double-bluff. There’s a distinction between characters who are doing what they’re doing out of ideological conviction and those who are simply out for power and advancement, but one senses that eventually the believers will in turn become the old cynics – it’s the job that does it to them in the end. This causes you to realise that once upon a time Leamas too was probably an idealist, making him more sympathetic than he first appears. We catch a glimpse too of how some join not through patriotism or belief, but because the job allows them to exercise a natural cruelty. And finally, we see how those at the top see agents as pawns on a chessboard, valuable up to a point, but sometimes worth sacrificing in the pursuit of victory. It’s a bleak tale and a complex one that requires concentration to follow the twisting maze of plot. Le Carré trusts his readers to read between the lines, in terms both of the action and of the motivations of the characters, and ultimately that’s what makes it so satisfying. There’s enough ambiguity in it for each reader to decide for herself exactly what the ending tells us, but there are also clues for those who were paying attention. For those of us who might have missed one or two(!), my Penguin Modern Classics edition has a short but insightful introduction from William Boyd, no slouch himself when it comes to espionage fiction, in which he discusses the impact of the book and his own interpretation of the underlying meanings. This intro must be read as an afterword since it gives away the ending, but it does have a warning to that effect. It’s a little more bleak than my taste usually runs to and it took me a bit of time to feel involved in the story, but by the end I was totally absorbed and emotionally hooked. The writing is excellent and le Carré remains totally in control of the complexities of the plotting at all times. There’s an almost noir feeling to it, certainly dark grey anyway, and a kind of despairing cynicism of tone, but there are also small shafts of light and the occasional unexpected humanity that remind us that these people do what they do so that we can live as we choose to live. But at what cost to themselves and, ultimately, to us? Thought-provoking, intelligent and engrossing – no wonder it’s considered a major classic of the genre. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

• I buoni e i cattivi

  Non sono uso a scrivere recensioni, troppo pigro, ma faccio un'eccezione, anche se non credo serva il mio giudizio per definire questo libro un capolavoro. E' geniale, dall'inizio alla fine. Non tanto per l'imprevedibilita': se gioite a prevedere lo sviluppo di una trama e' meglio buttarsi su un Agatha Christie, qua non e' cosi' difficile intuire dove si va a parare. E' come se i personaggi venissero gradualmente delineati in un gioco di specchi: avete presente il castello degli specchi nei luna park anni 80? Il bene e il male si rincorrono in un labirinto. Immaginate una trama di menzogne ricorsive intrecciate da Borges, narrata con aplomb, ironia e tempra morale britanniche e impiantata nella Germania Est anni 50. Chi sono i buoni e i cattivi, il vostro istinto ve lo dira' dall'inizio, ma solo alla fine capirete cosa era vero e cosa immagine riflessa. E Liz non la dimenticherete facilmente.

Purchase links