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Aug 11, 2018diaparalectdoxical rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Leamas’ network of spies is destroyed. He is called back from Berlin to London where his boss, Control, wonders if Leamas is “burned out.” Leamas spirals into poverty, alcoholism and anger, ending in imprisonment for an assault. Friendless, Leamas is approached by East German counterintelligence. Now Leamas leaves the cold to enter the deep freeze of the apostate, the betrayer of his past life and his country. But in this novel, things as they appear are not things as they are. The idea of the ‘cold’ is the central one in this novel. “A man permanently isolated in deceit” lives in the cold, according to Leamas. ‘Control’ says to Leamas, “We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? … We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean … one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold…”. So the cold is the place where spies live a duplicitous life, apart from and alienated from others, acting a role, using others as instruments of a state’s political goals. The concept of the ‘cold’ links to the novel’s love interest where the hard-bitten Leamas actually connects with another person. The novel documents betrayal after betrayal, they are piled up, one on top another.