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

[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.