Bangladesh, Aug. 9 -- John le Carrés Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy endures not simply as the anti-James Bond film but as something rarer: a diagnosis of Western civilization at the moment it began losing faith in itself. Where the James Bond franchise offered a fantasy of Western vitality-technological mastery, erotic confidence, geopolitical clarity-le Carrés world presents the opposite. In place of glamour there is fatigue; in place of moral certainty, ambiguity. At the center of that world stands George Smiley, perhaps the least heroic intelligence officer ever placed at the center of a spy story.

Bond is kinetic, charismatic, and sexually triumphant. Smiley is sedentary, melancholy, and painfully aware that his wife repeatedly ...