History Characters / TheQuestForKarla

* BewareTheQuietOnes: Turns out to be willing to be just as brutal and cruel as any other spy, despite his unassuming, quiet nature.

* AdaptationalAttractiveness: George Smiley is described in Call for the Dead as short, plump, and always wearing ill-fitting clothes so he resembles a "shrunken toad". Neither of his onscreen portrayals capture this.

* BadassBureaucrat: In the office, Smiley is typically a quiet, meek figure, whose demeanor belies the many, many successful operations that he has run. In ''Tinker Tailor'' he was the one called in to hunt down TheMole. In ''Honorable Schoolboy'' he was responsible for largely rebuilding the Circus from the ground up. In ''Smiley's People'' he's spending his retirement working on a monograph but is again called out of retirement because his agents know that there is no one as good as he.

* BigNo: A very uncharacteristic one from Smiley in ''Smiley's People'', when Connie Sachs mentions that many people in the Circus thought that he and Karla [[NotSoDifferentRemark weren't that different]].

* MandatoryUnretirement: Smiley just can't stay retired. ''Call For The Dead'', ''The Spy Who Came In From The Cold'', ''Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'' and ''Smiley's People'' all have him pulled back into the Circus after an attempt at retirement. (And ''A Murder of Quality'' has him investigate a murder during one of those periods as a favour to an old friend.)

* KnightInSourArmor: Smiley is an experienced but cynical spy. Despite the moral complications and issues of his work, idealistic but also fully aware of the [[GrayAndGreyMorality greyness of his environment]].

* VagueAge: Smiley seems to exist somewhere on a floating timeline, with his birth year being retconned in ''Tinker Tailor'' from 1906 to 1915, making him around fifty-eight during the events of that novel, aging into his sixties during the trilogy. Then he ''keeps'' appearing in other novels in Le Carré's canon taking place across several decades. In his last appearance, in ''A Legacy of Spies,'' he is over one hundred years old. A reference in ''[=Smiley's=] People'' to his declining health due to his increasing heaviness and advancing age is quietly ignored in subsequent appearances.

* HypercompetentSidekick / NumberTwo: To Alleline.

* TheHorseshoeEffect: [[spoiler: Much is made of the irony that a quintessential upper-class British ultraconservative is a mole in the service of communism. At Oxford, he was genuinely of the Right, belonging to a political club led by his tutor, Fanshawe, a Circus talent spotter who was, in Smiley's opinion, a "passionate Empire man." During this period, by his own account, Haydon details a talent for mixing with a rival left-wing club in order to spy on and subvert its membership, {{Foreshadowing}} a situation where the reverse would be true later in life -- the Soviet agent Gerald mixing with upper class British society to undermine the country. In his dubious and contradictory MotiveRant, Haydon reveals a deep hatred of America specifically, even those both of the Cold War hegemons were equally responsible for the sidelining of the British Empire, indicating that he, a hardcore Empire man, finds the Soviet Union more relatable. That the most outwardly right-wing of Control's inner circle was the traitor is at the heart of Smiley's metaphor of the nesting dolls: the final doll, which only Karla could perceive, was that Haydon the British imperialist and Gerald the Soviet mole were the same man in character, if not in political alignment.]]

* HorseshoeEffect: [[spoiler: Much is made of the irony that a quintessential upper-class British ultraconservative is a mole in the service of communism. At Oxford, he was genuinely of the Right, belonging to a political club led by his tutor, Fanshawe, a Circus talent spotter who was, in Smiley's opinion, a "passionate Empire man." During this period, by his own account, Haydon details a talent for mixing with a rival left-wing club in order to spy on and subvert its membership, {{Foreshadowing}} a situation where the reverse would be true later in life -- the Soviet agent Gerald mixing with upper class British society to undermine the country. In his dubious and contradictory MotiveRant, Haydon reveals a deep hatred of America specifically, even those both of the Cold War hegemons were equally responsible for the sidelining of the British Empire, indicating that he, a hardcore Empire man, finds the Soviet Union more relatable. That the most outwardly right-wing of Control's inner circle was the traitor is at the heart of Smiley's metaphor of the nesting dolls: the final doll, which only Karla could perceive, was that Haydon the British imperialist and Gerald the Soviet mole were the same man in character, if not in political alignment.]]

* CommieNazis: ZigZagged. Classist, imperialist snob with a rather repulsive disposition on women and apparently also an antisemite? Check. [[spoiler: While also apparently having become a full-blown communist after being made Karla's mole, if his surface-level marxist rhetoric during his interrogation is genuine, despite being a staunch right-winger during his youth and repeatedly claiming the next day to have only worked with the Soviets because he considered them better "partners" than the Americans in advancing british geopolitical interests...in short, only a Commie Nazi if you take his contradictory rantings after being caught at face-value]]

* CommieNazis: ZigZagged. Classist, nationalist snob with a rather dim view on women and apparently also an antisemite? Check. [[While also apparently having become a full-blown communist after being made Karla's mole, if his surface-level marxist rhetoric during his interrogation is genuine, despite being a staunch right-winger during his youth and repeatedly claiming the next day to have only worked with the Soviets because he considered them better "partners" than the Americans in advancing british geopolitical interests...in short, only a Commie Nazi if you take his contradictory rantings at face-value]]

* IncompetenceInc: The Circus in ''Tinker Tailor'' is an institution in decline due to the actions of TheMole in subverting it, but the narrative makes it clear that he was only able to get so far because of the complacency, laziness, and greed endemic in its membership. It's telling that Karla's ultimate aim isn't to gain control of the Circus for its own sake, but to use it as a conduit to siphon prized American intelligence.

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Esterhase is a con man who deals in counterfeit art and lives in the dry-cleaning shop he owns. He's also one of the Circus' top spies and the head of their domestic surveillance unit, who themselves are made up of an array of homeless people, families, and Eastern Europeans that live in a trailer camp in a hidden car park behind the shop. [[spoiler:It speaks to Esterhase's value that despite his role in the Bill Haydon debacle, he's the one person in Alleline's former faction who survives termination and is brought back for subsequent books. When Smiley comes back for one final job in ''Smiley's People'', Esterhase is one of the few people he trusts to help with the assignment, despite Esterhase's louche nature.]]

Hungarian-born head of the lamplighters, The Circus's surveillance and wiretapping section.

* MandatoryUnretirement: Goes through this ''twice'', first at the start of ''Tinker Tailor'' and again at the start of ''Smiley's People''.

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Esterhase is a con man who deals in counterfeit art and lives in the dry-cleaning shop he owns. He's also one of the Circus' top spies and the head of their domestic surveillance unit, who themselves are made up of an array of homeless people, families, and Eastern Europeans that live in a trailer camp in a hidden car park behind the shop. [[spoiler:It speaks to Esterhase's value that despite his role in the Bill Haydon debacle, he's the one person in Alleline's former faction who survives termination and is brought back for the subsequent books. When Smiley comes back for one final job in ''Smiley's People'', Esterhase is one of the few people he trusts to help with the assignment, despite Esterhase's louche nature.]]

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Esterhase is a con man who deals in counterfeit art and lives in the dry-cleaning shop he owns. He's also one of the Circus' top spies and the head of their domestic surveillance unit, who themselves are made up of an array of homeless people, families, and Eastern Europeans that live in a trailer camp in a hidden car park behind the shop. [[spoiler:It speaks to Esterhase's value that despite his role in the Bill Haydon debacle, he's the person in Alleline's inner circle who survives termination and is brought back for the subsequent books. When Smiley comes back for one final job in ''Smiley's People'', Esterhase is one of the few people he trusts to help with the assignment, despite Esterhase's louche nature.]]

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Constantly bitches and moans about resources and his workload, is cold and rude to his colleagues, runs scams and has an extremely strange way of speaking. However, whenever he's shown on the job he's utterly professional and gets it done. [[spoiler:For this reason he's the only member of Alleline's group to remain in the Circus at the start of ''The Honourable Schoolboy''.]]

* FatalFlaw: Arrogance. Facilitating "Merlin" gives him an overinflated sense of his own brilliance and he is quick to drum out anybody who jeopardizes his plans for the Circus, which makes him an obvious suspect when Smiley begins the mole hunt. [[spoiler:It turns out that Karla and Haydon recognized this quality and Alleline and deliberately used it as part of the Witchcraft scheme.]]

* AmbiguouslyGay: Haydon is bisexual, but just ''how'' "inseparable" he and Prideaux are is never made clear. Their relationship is certainly intense.

* EtTuBrute: [[spoiler: He betrays Jim Prideaux to the Russians, leading to his capture and torture. What makes it worse is that Jim independently figured out Haydon was the mole and warned him. All that did was prompt Bill to sell him out.]]

* FatalFlaw: His admiration of America. Watching from his posting in South America, he admired the United States's ability to route the "forces of centralisation," and nearly ended his career early by getting himself involved in an American plot to engineer regime change. Of the six senior officers in the Circus, he is the most stridently Atlanticist, and makes the possibility of a long-term intelligence deal one of the selling points of Witchcraft.

* ThePeterPrinciple: He's out of his depth when it comes to Russia and the satellite states. His area of expertise is in Latin America, India, and the Middle East, where even Smiley internally acknowledges that he did a good job. [[spoiler: This makes him the best possible mark for Haydon's scheme with Witchcraft.]]

* TheDilbertPrinciple: [[spoiler:Bill Haydon]] arranges for Alleline to get appointed Chief of the Circus by providing him with seemingly useful Soviet intelligence, knowing that he's one of the most incompetent spies in the agency—and thus, the one least likely to finger [[spoiler:Haydon]] as TheMole.

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* BadassBookworm / BadassBureaucrat: Smiley, who specializes in German poetry. In the office, he is typically a quiet, meek figure, whose demeanor belies the many, many successful operations that he ran. In ''Tinker Tailor'' he was the one called in to hunt down TheMole; in ''Honorable Schoolboy'' he was responsible for largely rebuilding the Circus from the ground up. In ''Smiley's People'', he's spending his retirement working on a monograph, but is again called out of retirement because his agents know that there is no one as good as he.

Head of The Circus following Control's ouster, gaining recognition for cultivating a supposedly high-placed Soviet source codenamed "Merlin".