Yesterday as I was sorting through my RSS feed I ran across several John Le Carré articles on Slate. Since I posted a review of Smiley’s People (last book of Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy and 8th book in the George Smiley series) I held the posts to turn today in the John Le Carré day.
Ted Scheinman has written a glowing piece on why he has read every one of Le Carré’s novels. I would have skipped over it, except that many of the book reviewers that I know also revere Le Carré.
Scheinman also give us his ranking of Le Carré’s 23 novels. I disagree with the ranking because it puts The Honorable Schoolboy, one of my two least favorite Le Carré novels as number two. But with the exception of that ‘mistake’, I basically agree with the ranking of the rest of the books that I have read.
Also Scheinman put together several video clips of Le Carré film adaptations as part of a longer article working through why Le Carré has had relatively few of his books adapted to film. (The short version of the article is that the plots are too difficult to put to film.)
Of course the whole reason for the articles is that yesterday was the release of Le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth