Nice analysis of Le Carre's books up to the point of Little Drummer Girl. It does not really grapple with some of the issues that could have come up such as whether the "groundedness" of Le Carre's writing could survive the passing of the world in which it was grounded and the difficulties of writing novels for an audience that would notice the lack of women as central actors as opposed to those acted upon. ( )

It wasn't until I got to "The Night Manager" that I started to like Le Carre. I read "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" later in my Le Carre binge because it was hard to find before I got on to the idea of searching the net through Alibris and ABE Books -that I liked a lot. Maybe I had a problem with the spying thing but I think it was probably that those books all seemed to end with the death of a character I was being to appreciate. I am a bit of a Pollyanna in that I like life and my story books to be happy ones. Anyway, in this little book, Mr Lewis has awakened a different appreciation in me of the early Le Carre books. I have enjoyed reading his explanations, assessments and critiques of each of the first nine "spy" novels. There was a brief reference to "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" and I was disappointed by that omission but, in all, It is a good book to library alongside the novels themselves. ( )