Cimorene

Our Kind of Traitor is the only le Carré I've read so far that doesn't feature at least one central man with a fatal-flaw twisted obsession, of a particularly gendered and objectifying kind, with a woman.

There are other kinds of relationships with women too, and there are female characters and narrators; but it can't help giving the impression that romanticized fixation is the next most common element of spycraft after waiting. You'd think they would have designed inoculations or obsession resistance training at this rate.

[H]is smile went with him everywhere. The typists declared that he slept in it, and hand-washed it at weekends.

-The Honourable Schoolboy

Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

-The Honourable Schoolboy

The whole house gently asserted an air of old age; it had a quality, like incense, of courteous but inconsolable sadness.

-The Looking Glass War

...and I am so, so sick of these gross middle-aged male characters who are grossly obsessed with various women and/or with all women all the time, like so sick of them that I don't actually care that that's the point and they're gross on purpose and the obsession is potentially their downfall and it's not even really unrealistic. (At least I presume not.) Like, just let me out of this gross POV character's head.

UGH.

(And that's not actually the hardest part about the book. All the White Man's Burden stuff is worse.)

(But Smiley is great. My favorite Smiley moment so far in this book is when Connie Sachs and Peter Guillam are watching him reading files to himself in his weird little eccentric way and she mouths "Isn't he a love?" at Guillam, much to Guillam's strangely intense righteous fury [even though he himself has just been thinking how cute it is].)

... and the changes made to the gay (/bisexual) content when converting book to movie, in both directions:

...oh. Yes, I see. Well, I think it was well meant and the change to Guillam was all to the good, but... if they thought that a change from text into subtext wouldn't make any real difference to the meat of the story, I don't think I agree.

Wikipedia had failed to inform me that Peter Guillam (played by Cumberbatch) wasn't gay in the book! A deftly-chosen alteration that increased relevancy to the present while also enabling it to illuminate an issue that was quite a bit worse in the time it's set in. I admit, when I saw the publication date I was a bit surprised about that at first (but since his narrative ends in misery I figured it was still regressive... though more 80s-90s than 60s).

I went back to look at Wikipedia just to check, and there's no space dedicated to adaptational choices or differences or anything, even though the book and the movie both have their own articles and the book's has a subheading about the movie.

The book's Guillam has the same unconscious casual misogyny as the not-a-hero protagonist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I think, although we see that one form an attachment to a woman eventually while still being both completely awful and completely earnest (that might be where this is going too). This is obviously not sympathetic, but it's also obviously on purpose, because we can see what le Carré's ideas of not awful attitudes to women are elsewhere in his work. So while I'm not enjoying it, I can give him credit since it's what he was going for, like when someone does a successful job of making a food you don't like, or of painting something really disgusting. Like "Yep. That worked, that's doing what you wanted it to."

So far Guillam is a womanizer, which is even more tiresome than just basic misogyny, from my point of view. I mean, I'm still going to finish the book, but since that keeps putting me off it's definitely slowing me down. I might've just stayed up and finished it last night already if that weren't the case. (And also if in addition to not being offputting a character had actually been gay, I might've finished it days ago, since after I first picked it up I set it aside and read Full Fathom Five and about 100,000 words of fanfiction before coming back to it yesterday.)