House of Chains; or, The Ballad of Karsa Orlong
"The glory of battle, Koryk, dwells only in the bard's voice, in the teller's woven words. Glory belongs to the ghosts and poets. What you hear and dream isn't the same as what you live—blur the distinction at your own peril, lad." In the wake of the response to his 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , in which audiences romanticised its tragic portrayal of Cold War espionage, John le Carré set out to completely satirise that which he was already attempting to deconstruct. If readers didn’t understand the futility depicted in that novel, he had to write it in a way they could understand. The result was The Looking Glass War , a comically bleak look at a washed-up intelligence agency and their futile attempt to corroborate a Communist defector’s intel. Where The Spy… was a page-turner, a critical but compelling look at spy work, Looking Glass is dull, dreary, and entirely concerned with the failures of extraordinarily incompetent men. It’s not ha
