Jim was snared, shot twice in the back, tortured until there was nothing left to confess, and then sent back to England, broken and bitter, where he took Major Dover’s old job, teaching foreign languages to the pale boys of Somerset. Whoever the mole was, though, he knew all about Jim’s venture and set a trap. Jim was dispatched to Eastern Europe on a solo mission, to discover, from a contact, the identity of the traitor, and report back to Control. The nameless old ringmaster of the place, referred to only as Control, was privately convinced that one of his senior figures was a Soviet-run double agent-or, in Circus patois, a mole. Then, there is Jim, poor Jim Prideaux, lately a stalwart of the Secret Intelligence Service, or S.I.S.-known to the public as M.I.6, or, within the pages of le Carré, as the Circus. Believe in them all you like, but you won’t pin them down. Truths are misty and multiple, like ghosts. Hence the dash of genius in those first three words, enough to show that we are already in the hands of a supreme ironist: “The truth is.” It never just is.

We are plunged in medias res, but what are the res? Taunton is a town in Somerset, in southwest England, but who, pray, is this defunct major? And what might Thursgood’s be? It turns out to be a prep school-a private establishment, for boys up to the age of thirteen, and a likely seedbed for some of the future spies, at once clubbable and closely guarded, who bestrew le Carré’s work. The opening sentence of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a 1974 novel by John le Carré, runs as follows: “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.” The tone is instant and unmistakable, with our narrator buttonholing us like a man who, having overheard our conversation in a pub, is leaning across to join in, or to contest our version of events. Photograph by Ralph Crane / Time Life Pictures / Getty for five years, and Smiley had already appeared in his novels.

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