Number eight is by John Le Carre. Like many authors at the time he must have had a few regretful thoughts when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Basically his genre was also brought down with it, as his greatest works in my opinion were about the spies in the Cold War.
If you've been reading the blog for some time then you know that his The Spy Who Came in from the Cold featured high up on my ten favorite films, and in fact it might have appeared here as well in book form. But le Carre has written two dozen books and most of them are absolutely wonderful. I thnk he's "gone off" since the happy days of our benign fights with the Soviets and he's strayed into the liberal mindset of blaming business for the world's ills, which is not nearly so satisfying. Of all his books my favorite has to be Smiley's People. It is a complex study of the two masterminds of the secret service on each side of the Iron Curtain. It also shows the infighting that used to be a regular part of life in The Circus, which was the term fot MI5 back in those dark, but a lot more understandable days. Number eight on the list of my best books - Smiley's People, by John le Carre.
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