First edition. The Looking-Glass War was the fourth of le Carré’s novels (and the fourth Smiley novel), and followed The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963) – an international success which had provided the author with the financial security to resign from the Foreign Service in early 1964 and ‘changed David [Cornwall]’s life irrevocably’ (A. Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography (London, 2015), p. 263). After moving with his family from Germany to Crete, le Carré began work on The Looking-Glass War and finished the first draft on 30 May 1964. ¶¶

Informed by the author’s belief that ‘the intelligence community, on its knees after a succession of disasters, [was] a measure of the hapless state of the country’ (op. cit., p. 252), The Looking-Glass War ‘is a story of incompetence and self-delusion. A washed-up unit of military intelligence, sustained only by the memory of wartime heroics, decides to mount an operation; an ill-equipped agent is sent into East Germany to investigate insubstantial rumours of missile deployment. The agent, Leiser, is sacrificed to feed the fantasies of the aging men in control of “the Department”’ (loc. cit.). ¶¶

Le Carré’s first three novels had been published by Victor Gollancz, but his dissatisfaction with the publisher had led him to enter discreet negotiations with Charles Pick, the managing director of Heinemann. Despite Gollancz’s immediate acceptance of new terms proposed by le Carré’s agent Peter Watt, the English-language rights for The Looking-Glass War were finally sold to Heinemann for some £145,000 (by comparison, Gollancz had paid an advance of £175 for The Spy who Came in from the Cold). In response to criticisms voiced by his publisher, le Carré made significant changes to the draft text, and The Looking-Glass War ‘would be the only one of David’s books altered radically at an editor’s request’ (op. cit., p. 267). ¶¶

The novel was published in Britain by Heinemann on 21 June 1965 and shortly afterwards in the United States, receiving a somewhat mixed critical reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the positive reviews, however, was Eric Ambler’s for Life magazine, in which the veteran British thriller writer lauded The Looking-Glass War as ‘very well written and very exciting indeed’, judging that with this novel ‘John le Carré may not exactly have done it again but he has done something almost as reassuring. He has made it plain that The Spy who Came in from the Cold was not a fluke, and that those of us who like good spy novels and good writing may expect a long and mutually profitable relationship with him’ (quoted in op. cit., p. 295). ¶¶¶

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