‘Essentially, another man’s woman’: Information and Gender in the Novel and Adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

This article explores the commodification and conflation of gender and information that are manifest in the novel and the television, radio, and film adaptations of
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Even though the core thematic focus of the adaptations often correlate with those of the novel—concepts of love, obsession and rivalry—this article aims to show that the representation of material information is conflated with the representations of gender, in particular through the characters of Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley. In the adaptations studied, this manifests slightly differently in terms of narrative but is a core principle that the texts rely on for their dramatic structures. Consequently, each adaptation adapts something of the gender and information politics of the last thirty years.