Famously, where Ian Fleming glamorised spies, John Le Carré placed his former spook colleagues in more lifelike circumstances, making them grimmer, grubbier and more mortal. Many, though, sought also to be moral, struggling Greene-like with personal fallibility, compromise, great power politics and the search for good deeds in a naughty world. But these figures, as with Fleming, were all about heroics — fighting the good fight, usually against communism/totalitarianism. Smiley, after all, was based in part on a vicar.
There is rather less room for righteousness in James Wolff’s latest thriller, Spies and Other Gods. In Le Carré, the characters…
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