TTSS is a masterclass of what you can do within genre literature (or perhaps an argument that some genre books should be considered as simply "Literature" end stop): a work where the way it's written and the accumulation of details is crucial to the overall themes and end of the book. Smiley's perception throughout the book is detail-laced, almost to the point of being buried by them, and the stories he reads and hears wind their way forward and backward through time. It's about as close as you can get to a gordian knot of a tale, and Smiley has to eventually return to past grievances to fully understand it all.

It's the 1970s, and potential soviet spies are everywhere. Nothing is clear at all, and the most obvious facts may turn out to be your undoing. This is the set that le Carre plays with, and by the end, you're as paranoid as Smiley. Yet le Carre doesn't fill the book with double-crossings and surprise twists. Instead, there's more a gradual shudder as the mystery sheds off its layers like old snakeskins. You read (and over-read) every action because you know that any one of it could be the clue, yet harbor a despair that even if all the information was in front of you, the chances of you reaching their conclusion (or rather, a conclusion) is startlingly slim.

I imagine this book would pair well with Errol Morris' Believing is Seeing, a book that shares le Carre's conviction that there is a base truth to the world, but it may be so inaccessible that we'll forever be in error, and it is in trying to suss it out that we find the greater meanings of what has occurred..