The Spy Who Came in from the Cold review – first staging of le Carré classic is a hot ticket

Reread now, le Carré’s novel is a twisting thriller about the pressures of pretence and lying, in spying and love, but heavy with of-the-time racial and sexual slang that may put some readers off. Sensibly, Eldridge keeps the plot but washes the argot. The narrative compression is elegant, pages becoming single lines, and the timeline jumbled to increase tension about whether some events are Leamas’s imaginings, nightmares or false memories.