Novel: The Looking Glass War

Overview

John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War revisits the shadow world of British intelligence a few years after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but turns the lens on a different service: a faded, underfunded wartime outfit known simply as the Department. Once vital in sabotage and resistance work, it now lives on fumes and memories, resentful of being eclipsed by the professionalized “Circus.” A scrap of alarming intelligence, a hint of East German missiles, offers the Department a last, intoxicating chance to reclaim relevance. The result is a bleak comedy of errors in which nostalgia, pride, and institutional decay prove as lethal as any enemy.

Story

The Department obtains a roll of film suggesting a rocket site near the East German border, passed through a nervous RAF pilot who tried to help them off the books. Hungry for a triumph it can call its own, the Department’s chief, Leclerc, and his deputy, Haldane, revive old wartime methods rather than concede the case to the Circus. They dust off an old network, requisition equipment, and, over objections and condescension from George Smiley’s people, decide to send an agent across the border to verify the site by radio.

Their choice is Fred Leiser, a Polish-born veteran who worked for them in the war and now lives a shabby, lonely life in England. Flattered and longing for purpose, Leiser submits to hurried retraining. The Department’s younger officer, John Avery, becomes his handler, initially swept up by the romance of the mission and the paternal confidence of his superiors. But the training is sloppy, the radio procedures antiquated, and key logistics are fumbled. The RAF pilot’s attempt to replicate his sighting ends in a fatal crash, leaving the photographic “proof” uncertain.

Leiser’s crossing into East Germany is bungled and violent. He kills a border guard, instantly turning from clandestine visitor into wanted murderer. He trudges through a landscape that has changed since the war, seeking contacts who have moved on or died, improvising with a radio that is clumsy to operate and poorly supported from London. His transmissions are erratic, his tradecraft dated, and the East German security services rapidly begin to close in.

Back in London, the Department drifts between denial and self-justification. Requests for better gear and tighter coordination come too late or not at all. The Circus hovers disapprovingly, offering limited help but refusing to own the mess. As Leiser grows more desperate, Avery’s admiration curdles into dread. The mission delivers no solid intelligence on rockets, only mounting evidence of an operation conceived in wishful thinking and run with fatal amateurism.

Climax and aftermath

Leiser is captured after a grim, attritional chase. No rockets are found, and whether they ever existed remains murky; the original film might have been misread or manipulated, but the truth no longer matters. The Department, facing embarrassment and bureaucratic ruin, retreats into the one skill it still commands: the fabrication of a face-saving story. Leiser is abandoned to his fate, quietly written off as a rogue or a mirage.

Themes and tone

The novel is a study of institutional vanity and the corrosive power of nostalgia. The Department’s leaders are trapped by the mirror of their wartime glory, enacting a “looking-glass” version of the past that ignores a changed reality. The tone is wintry, sardonic, and deeply humane toward the expendable people caught between careerist calculations and geopolitical theater. Where spy fiction often fetishizes competence, le Carré strips the trade to its petty rivalries, logistical blunders, and moral evasions, leaving a residue of pity and quiet fury.