Reading 1001 discussion

23. Respond to this review from http://tobedwithatrollope.wordpress.c...
"He (the author) deals in all in shades and variations of grey, from the grey skies of London to the grey buildings in Cambridge Circus (the home base of the British Intelligence network) to the grey areas of morality where his characters always seem to dwell. George Smiley, though fantastically clever, is a rather faded character — as if years and years of working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service had washed all the colour out of him."

Did you experience this novel as colorless or grey?

I'm not sure I would have initially described it as colorless or grey but it is an interesting idea to contemplate. To me colorless or grey suggests drab and uninteresting and that wasn't my experience of the book. Grey in the sense of moral and ethical ambiguity and complexity with subtle differences being what drives things, yes. I do disagree with the portrayal of Smiley as faded. To me he was far from faded. Disenfranchised but certainly not a faded character. He had strong personality and that came through for me.

I'd say Smiley was fading, but not faded: this case probably gave him a boost of liveliness, despite the gray-ish environments. I felt a bit of gray or of progressive darkness in Jim's re-telling of the bungled Czech operation; it was also cloudy and snowing during that episode, so the snow might not have appeared as white, but slightly gray under the cover of darkness.