Recent events (the killing of the General) move Smiley to visit retired Circus operative Toby Esterhase, now running an (Islamic) art gallery in London. The distance Smiley keeps from the gallery until the last possible moment is an English thing and intended to convey his suspicion of art, its ambiguities and its pretensions. It should not be confused with a) a spymaster's effort to absorb all exterior details of the gallery; b) an ignorance of art (once inside and visiting with Toby, Smiley rightly identifies a fake Degas sculpture); or c) antipathy toward the Islamic world.
Smiley presses the buzzer and is buzzed in by a secretary who can see him through the full-length glass walls that encase this corner business. She hands him a sheet with the artworks listed on it and adds that the "round red dots" represent sales. Smiley knows this because he rolls his eyes upon turning away from her. The eye roll is followed by another eye roll once he passes by a wall work we cannot see in full but appears to be an abstraction.
The next artwork Smiley visits (bottom) is an abstracted desert landscape that looks like something you might find in the collection of Uday Hussein. I wondered if it was "real" or if it was made for this mini-series. If the latter, then to what end? How was it directed? We need a contemporary painting and it should be a desert with a strange red object elongating its way through it? The mother of those round red dots?
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