John le Carré: Call for the Dead

The first thing a book reviewer should tell you is what connects the books he favors.  Your fertile mind already knows why a reviewer’s preferences are relevant.  But wordy bastard that I am, I’m going to tell you anyway. 

Books that are page-turners for one reader are slogs in ankle deep mud for another.  Why is that?

As Louise Rosenblatt famously wrote, there are three points of view involved in reading a book:  what the writer intended to write, what he actually wrote, and what the reader’s experiences bring to the book.

Let’s say an automotive enthusiast thinks he’s writing a thriller, but what really comes out is a plot strung together with fists full of engineering details.  The Tom Clancy of Detroit.

Along comes a reader who’s an engineer.  He’s enthralled!  Along comes yours truly, who knows how to change oil, put gas in the tank, and on rare occasions (thank goodness) knows how to use a jack and a spare tire.  Which one of us is this book going to thrill?

So what kind of reader is this reviewer?  I like character driven plots.  And by that, I don’t mean angst upon angst, but rather main characters who embrace the human element and are strong and true to themselves.  Don’t give me a detective that is suddenly afraid to pull the trigger, or a terrified wife who cannot overcome her fears and rise to the occasion.  Don’t bore me with twenty pages of divorce and finding solace in a bottle.

How about the plot?  I demand twists, turns, and even a few digressions, but not to the detriment of this reader’s attention span.

At the top of my list is prose that flows as smoothly as water over glass, without pretentiousness or contrivances.

Now that you know. let’s breeze off into the world of espionage, 1950’s style, with John le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, where we’ll meet Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley.

“When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary…Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

This is our hero, our main character in an espionage novel???  Unlike James Bond, who roams the globe in fast cars, with the fast women, while winning vast sums in casinos, and staying in the world’s grand hotels, George Smiley lives in an unremarkable apartment in London.  In the war he distinguished himself with hard work and undeniable results.  But, he just didn’t fit the model of a leader, so while he was kept on after the war, he remained ordinary and a bit of a necessary pain for the bureaucrats in charge.

But, most of all, George Smiley has a mind that processes bits and pieces that don’t quite fit.  He also has the constitution of a bulldog whose teeth never loose their grip, no matter how many other minds distract his path of inquiry.

Call for the Dead begins with a suicide.  Immediately Smiley is under the gun.  He interviewed the man only yesterday.  Did the interview go badly?  Was it something Smiley said that caused an unintended event?

Smiley seems to have been affected only by the tragedy that produced a death and a widow, not by the snide inquiries into his own behavior.  Something bothers him and it’s not the bureaucratic heat.

For the next 150 pages the book would not release me from it’s thought provoking pages.  When I wasn’t reading, I was thinking.

It’s no wonder the Sunday Telegram glowed with enthusiasm:  “Intelligent, thrilling, surprising…makes most cloak and dagger stuff taste of cardboard.”

George Smiley flows off the page, just as real as if we were sitting with him in some innocuous parlor, sipping tea from cracked cups.  And the plot, even with the unexpected twists and turns, never waivers.

Toss away thoughts of James Bond’s world, singlehandedly stopping madmen from producing nuclear weapons and controlling the planet.  Instead, pick a quiet time, pour yourself a whiskey with soda, settle into an easy chair, and blissfully wander into George Smiley’s world of quiet, deliberate espionage. But, don’t be lulled, it’s a thriller.