Call for the Dead: A George Smiley Novel by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "A game played with clouds in the sky" Call for the Dead (1961) is John le Carre's first published novel and the first featuring his spy George Smiley, a neat protagonist. "Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition," toad-like with a tick in one eye, he's no handsome spy of action ala Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne or James Bond. He's an expert in obscure, 17th-century German poets, and posed in pre-WWII Germany as a scholar-lecturer while really serving as a talent-scout for potential spies. Now during the Cold War he's working for "the Circus," a fictionalized British Intelligence, as a home-based Intelligence Officer without expectation of promotion. He's been divorced by his beautiful upper-crust wife Lady Ann Sercomb and is still imagining what she'd say in certain situations. He's intelligent, possessed of a quick and powerful memory, and an astute judge of human nature and character. No idealist, he's aware that his work has encouraged his "bloodless and inhuman" side and left him somewhat hollow. After establishing Smiley's character and history, the plot of the novel begins when Smiley learns that the Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan has committed suicide. Just the day before Smiley interviewed Fennan to let him know that he was not under suspicion from an anonymous letter referring to his Oxford University days' communism, and he knows that the man couldn't have felt that his career was in jeopardy or his loyalty questioned, so he doesn't believe the suspiciously typed suicide note. Smiley interviews Fennan's widow Elsa, a "slight, fierce woman in her fifties with hair cut very short and dyed the color of nicotine," a Jewish woman with a slight German accent and the atmosphere of the concentration camp survivor. After talking with her, he knows that she lied to him, but he also cannot believe that she could have killed her husband. That said, (perhaps partly thinking of his wife) Smiley does muse, "However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing." He has also become cynical about the concept of the state: "State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don't they and imprison people?" Then he considers his return to work as going "back to the unreality of containing a human tragedy in a three-page report." Enraged by his smooth head of service Maston not wanting to believe Fennan's death was a murder and very aware that "intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors," Smiley resigns and tries to solve the mystery on his own, enlisting the aid of just-retired policeman Mendel and spy colleague Peter Guillam. This leads to painful realizations about Smiley's past and a suspenseful climax involving a theater, the Thames, and the suitably opaque London fog. Call for the Dead is a compact and potent tale of espionage and murder, with a convincing set of characters and a complex (rather dark) vision of human nature and governments and bureaucrats and spies and the nations they're working for. No cardboard completely evil villains or completely good heroes here. Fans of literate murder mysteries with a political, espionage bent should like it. Audiobook reader Michael Jayston is excellent as the narrator and as the different characters, whether British, German, male, female, working class or Oxbridge. View all my reviews
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