It was my first Le Carré, and almost certainly my last. I read fiction to escape reality, not to be reminded of it, and so the matter-of-fact reality of the story was very depressing for me. I found the story well told, and the characters well-drawn, but by the time I'd reached the inevitable end, the feeling that what I'd read barely qualified as fiction at all left me feeling flat and in urgent need of some frothy escapism. I salute his skill as a writer, and strongly sympathise with his obvious anger at the system he writes about, but for me the entertainment value of the book was only non-zero by a statistically insignificant amount.