smiley's nipples: a liveblog (sort of) (feat.SPOILERS)

7: wish fulfilment for who? Readers, yes (we like these characters, this tale, perhaps want a "rewarding resolution" for the hero); and author yes (ditto really: plus TTSS was a different kind of critical success for him, drew him a different and perhaps quite flatterting level of respect). But Smiley?

Smiley not so much, at least not right away: "...the moment he heard Lacon's voice, he had the feeling of being hauled from a warm and treasure place, where he wished to remain undisturbed forever." Buffy, end of season five: Smiley is being called back from the dead. The General is dead; the dream of the General's political group, of exiled Estonians, are trapped in a dead dream (or a dream the post-Smiley circus has firmly declare dead). The policemen who greet Smiley are told "they "never saw him and it was two other blokes"; Lacon insists that he recognise he belongs to the past not the present; the Superintendent -- an overtly religious man, quite an unusual detail in JLC -- at the close of the encounter shines a torch in Smiley's face to fix the memory -- the reality of a supernatural moment? -- in his own mind...

And yet of course the actual concrete procedural facts of the encounter could not be more horribly real: Vladimir with his face shot off, in a wet pre-dawn reach of Hampstead Heath that you can pretty much identify to the inch from the description even today.