Book Review: Call for the Dead

[osprey_archer]

After months of waffling about the project, an unquenchable desire to read John le Carre came upon me, and I dived into the first Smiley book Call for the Dead.

The experience of reading a le Carre is normally like the experience of eating a shrimp cocktail from St. Elmo’s Steakhouse. The sauce is so loaded with horseradish that it sets your sinuses on fire, your nose and your eyes are both streaming, you really feel like this time your face might explode, but it’s soooo delicious that you eat it all up. Then you need about six months to recover before you’re ready to face another delicious, delicious, hurts-so-good shrimp cocktail.

This is le Carre’s first book, and you can tell, because it’s like eating a normal shrimp cocktail. It’s delicious, and there’s maybe a little burn, but it doesn’t give you that feeling that it’s a purifying fire in your soul. It’s just a perfectly good nice little murder mystery that happens to be about spies, and I need no recovery period before I start the next one, A Murder of Quality.

I’m curious if A Murder of Quality is the one where the purifying fire experience sets in, or if that will wait till The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall see!

Comments

[asakiyume]

A very delightful metaphor that makes me want to seek out a St. Elmo's Steakhouse and have a shrimp cocktail--whoa!

[osprey_archer]

As far as I know, St. Elmo is an Indianapolis special, but if you ever come visit we'll have to go there and try the shrimp cocktail.

[asakiyume]

If and when I come through, please let's go there!

[coffeeandink]

That is an awesome metaphor. I didn't think the purifying fire experience set in until The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but YMMV.

[kore]

And then some people gotta go and be all pithy, lol. Yes, ITA that Spy is the first novel of his where you need a long lie-down afterwards. So devastating.

[osprey_archer]

That seems to be the general consensus. I'll plan to have a bit of a lie-down after I finish The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

[kore]

Call for the Dead is mainly interesting as a kind of prelude to his later work -- the first exploration of "his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée" as James puts it. Smiley being brought in to investigate, Smiley being framed, Anne's promiscuity, the former victim of the Nazis who becomes fearsome in East Germany, Mendel and Guillem, Smiley as Holmes rather than Bond, the twist and counter-twist near the end....so much is there, already developed, including the bleak general outlook and ambiguous victory. But it doesn't quite all jell, not yet.

Just as you say, it starts off more as a murder mystery, but almost as disguise; Murder of Quality is much more a murder mystery with spies in, not a spy story misleadingly centered around a murder. (Murder of Quality also has twists that remind me very much of Christie!) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is really where you get the first full horseradish experience, I think. It shows perhaps his coldest view of humanity (interestingly, he revisited it in a retelling by Guillem, over fifty years later!). The movie is also excellent, and keeps the terribly depressing ending.

It kind of fascinates me that then, after his first big triumph re his chosen subject, artistically and professionally, he backs away in the next three novels from postwar Britain, then Smiley, then espionage itself until he writes the truly terrible autobiographical story of his sex life, which was justly panned. So he returned to the Circus, as Smiley always does, for his most famous books.

[osprey_archer]

He's still testing his powers in this book. Has constrained them perhaps by writing in, as it turns out, the genre just to the left of the one he really needs, murder mystery with spies in rather than straight-up spies.

It struck me also how much this book feels like it's starting in medias res - like we're in the middle of a detective series, and we should know from previous books who Maston and Guillem etc are, because he doesn't so much introduce them as just have them walk onto the page fully formed.

So he returned to the Circus, as Smiley always does, for his most famous books. Once a spy always a spy. Can't get away once you're in.

[kore]

And he wrote so many books after the Cold War ended and Smiley caught Karla! And I have read....very few of them, lolsob. Like, I started reading Constant Gardener and it was so unappealing.