James Bond vs. George Smiley — battle of the great British spies

polygon.com:

My father was a spy. He didn’t like to talk about it.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. He worked for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. He was an engineer, a radio man. He would live on expenses somewhere like South Africa or Pakistan, and occasionally drive his Land Rover up a mountain to intercept encrypted Soviet radio signals, then send them back to the codebreakers in London. He traveled and played tennis, he worked little and was paid a lot, but it was boring and alienating. He couldn’t even tell his parents what he was really doing; he barely knew himself. He hated it. He eventually left the Service for a job in industry, and finally became a math and science teacher. Later in life, he contacted MI6 to ask if he was owed a pension for his years of service, but they claimed to have no record of him.

But there were two sets of novels on our bookshelves that caught the eye of 12-year-old me: some James Bond books, by Ian Fleming, and a few works by the great chronicler of the secret world of international intelligence, John Le Carré. My dad wasn’t a great fiction reader — he preferred encyclopedias and radio manuals — but he enjoyed Fleming’s escapism, and praised Le Carré’s realism.

Unsurprisingly, they both always fascinated me. Bond needs no introduction: Fleming’s original version of the character, appearing in 14 books between 1953 and 1966, is a suave brute with a “comma of black hair,” a killer, a lover, a globe-trotting adventurer, the archetypal pulp hero with a twist of nastiness. Fleming, whose father was a wealthy politician, decided he wanted to write spy fiction while serving in naval intelligence during World War II.

Le Carré, whose