tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

I actually listened to this as audiobook while walking shortly before watching the film.

I found the book good but a little confusing.  It's one of those with a lot of characters who are introduced in fairly subtle ways and often without much in the way of physical description so there's not much for you to hang onto.

Plot wise it made perfect sense, but I had to really concentrate on the characters - particularly since the point is that one of them is a spy!

This film has a bit of a hard act to follow.  It's one of a few adaptations and one of the most famous was by the BBC and starred Alec Guinness of all people and was quite well regarded.

This is also the first in a set of stories by le Carre and featuring the character George Smiley and revolving around Karla, a Russian spy.  Smiley features in many other of le Carre's novels, but these are probably the most well known.  What I'm saying is that if they are adapting this then they probably intended to do all of the other Karla books.

So do I think they should - was it any good?

Well yes, I thought it was quite a good adaptation.  Smiley is played by Gary Oldman and I have to say he's perfect in the role.  He really nails the character and it's a suitably subtle performance - Smiley is a very taciturn, deliberate, thoughtful character, not given to outbursts or displays of emotion.

The story is necessarily tweaked to fit the running time, though the main core of the story is there.  The real changes are around the more peripheral characters.  One of the best examples of this is Jim Prideaux.  In the book there's quite a lot of stuff around his job as a school teacher, particularly revolving around one of the boys.  In the film he's a school teacher, and we see some of the events, but they're incidental flavour, rather than things that take up significant screen time.

This has the advantage of not muddying the waters - the focus is squarely on Smiley, though it does remove some of the colour.

Overall I thought it was a good adaptation then, particularly of material that's very cerebral in nature.