The writer who came into his own

John Le Carré

William Boyd writes in The Guardian about John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, which Boyd says reshaped the spy novel: "it was a paradigm shift in the genre – it would never be the same again and indeed its wider influence in literary fiction was manifold."

And, he writes, it was Le Carré's third novel, in which there "is a clear sense in The Spy of a writer hitting his stride with resolute confidence. Technically, on a purely writerly analysis, Le Carré seems to me to be operating at the highest levels."

He comments on the author's technique:

Unusually for a spy novel, Le Carré's narrative point of view is omniscient – a dangerous choice, because with authorial omniscience you cannot have your cake and eat it. If you are saying to the reader that you can enter the thoughts of any character and can comment on the action or events in your own voice, then any deliberate withholding of information counts as a black mark. The narrative house-of-cards begins to collapse; the reader's trust in the author's control dissipates immediately. 

There is never a sense that we are being overly manipulated – the choice of those characters whose inner thoughts he shares with us seems entirely apt – we never feel we are being narratively duped. Also, for a relatively short novel a tremendous amount is included. The ellipsis between chapter two and three is a model of how a simple change of point of view can eliminate pages and pages of laborious exposition.

Boyd has read and re-read the novel, and I suppose I should, too.