With Philby you were in negativeland, the silvery counterworld of the thing that you know but don’t want to know that you know—in other words, you were in what would later become the fictional atmosphere of John le Carré. When Smiley reflects upon the treachery—personal and professional—of his colleague Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré writes, “He knew, of course. He had always known … All of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which was like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.”

Taking the pen name John le Carré (he doesn’t remember where from), Cornwell began to write while still working in intelligence. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in 1963, was the breakthrough: a thriller with the purity of an existential fable, and a best seller. (Its success enabled him to retire from the service.)The cold in the book is actual—October winds and chilly rooms—but it is also metaphysical, infernal: It kills love. The British spy Alec Leamas returns to London from Berlin, his network of agents on the other side of the Wall having been destroyed by his opposite number, Mundt. He is summoned into the aura of his superior, the man known only as Control, a desiccated omniscience fussing over an electric heater. Control shakes Leamas’s hand “rather carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones,” and then tells him, “I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer.” A trap is being set for Mundt. Leamas is instructed to drift, detach, descend, burn out, become useless, until Moscow—convinced at last of his disaffection—makes its inevitable approach to turn him. He is to become a double agent. His cover will be no cover at all: total exposure to the slow wrath of society, and its cold war upon the lonely.

The Berlin Wall of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, le Carré would later write, was somehow his own wall: his burden, his blockage. “Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself, and it touched an anger in me … A disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself.” But of course it was no coincidence: Although le Carré has written plenty of excellent novels post-perestroika, it was his particular genius as a novelist—what Kipling would have called his “daemon”—that transformed the theater of the Cold War into his own beautifully resonating symbolic structure. The muffled violence, the bleak streets, the human data so refined as to be almost beyond perception—hypervigilance is part of the psychology of the abuse victim, as is dissociation. Standard spy stuff. Control discusses with Leamas the sensation of seeing one’s agent get shot: “a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body.”

And in the middle of it all is the spymaster Smiley, as much priest as agent, dense with subterranean knowledge, blinking, suffering, doughily pliable and razor-sharp. His wife cheats on him; his colleagues at the Circus, le Carré’s fictional version of British intelligence, corral him with a bruising, bullying affability. Quietly goes Smiley: memory spy, an artist of recollection, traveling back into the files, back into the memory banks of frazzled ex-Circus types such as Connie Sachs, back into his own mind, to find the truth of what is happening around him.