Le Carre

I tried once to read a John le Carre novel and failed to go further than 20 or so pages. I don't know why. The same reason, probably, I don't get on with Graham Greene's novels - except "The Comedians" which I liked enormously. I found his novel "Stamboul Train" enjoyable for about fifty pages until, inevitably I suppose, he introduced a character that was the devil incarnate. My favourite Greene story, a long one that may be called a novella, is "May we Borrow your husband". Maybe Greene and le Carre are similar writers in style as well as, sometimes, in content and maybe my aversion to le Carre stayed with me when I went to see the film "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". I did not like it at all. The chief reason was that I simply didn't know what was going in, I just couldn't follow it. It kept going back to previous happenings without a break, so to speak, so that the drive forward of the narrative, if there was one, was all the time prevented. Flashbacks in my youth were frowned upon in films, actually booed sometimes; the screen would show wavey pictures and everyone would groan or shout insults or boo. Hitchcock used a flashback once in a not very good film called "Stage Fright"; it worked there because the murderer was telling what had happened and it was all a lie.
I looked up "Rotten Tomatoes", a website good for heaps of reviews of films: every reviewer bar one thought "Tinker, Tailor etc" was the best thing since sliced bread. One I agreed with; he too thought the film confusing and confused. Everyone said how good Gary Oldman was whereas I thought he walked, at a liesurely pace, through the film as if he were dreaming about something other than catching the Mole who turned out to be..... no, I won't tell you since you probably, like 90% of the world's population, will enjoy the film.
I believe you need to have read the book to make sense of the film and, as I said, I can't read Le Carre.