ABSTRACT
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds an honoured place in the espionage genre. Considered by many to be John le Carré's best work it is also his most reproduced, having been continuously in print since its original publication in 1974, adapted as a television serial in 1979, broadcast as a radio play numerous times, and made into a film in 2011. Adaptation and nostalgia share this intermedial heart. In Fredric's classic account, nostalgia is maligned for commodifying history, falsifying and exchanging it for style. After Jameson, the study of nostalgia has expanded into more complex, subtle, and multifaceted forms. Coding, decoding, code manipulation and obfuscation, dog whistling, silence, and lying—these are important marks of the genre and require a high level of ‘deception detection’, as Jack Bratich notes. Hidden pictures, understyle, and lapses in continuity are the objects of Miller's obsessive reading, which he describes as a type of ‘attention surfeit disorder’.
