Call for the Dead by John le Carré

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Somehow I’ve made it this far in life without reading Le Carre’. I may have brushed up against him in adolescence, a movie here or an excerpt there, and at the time thought the tone too depressing, too realistic to be any fun, or perhaps just too gown up.

After a brief stint searching for a new audiobook (measured in hours, but if you’re a true addict such as myself you’ll know the twitchy agony of the condition), I resolved to tackle the George Smiley series, it being to Spy Fiction much as J.R. Tolkien is to Fantasy.

Call for the Dead is the first of that series, and now I see the reason for Le Carre’s apotheosis in the genre. I consumed the audio version, but am resolved to pick up a physical copy if only to study the prose. Le Carre’s fluency with language, his ability to convey character and atmosphere, and his subtle daubs of quietly hilarious resignation all serve to elevate this novel (and presumably the rest) far beyond the ordinary tales of espionage and adventure common to his day or ours. It’s the difference between a sophomore’s bagatelle and Brahms’ fourth symphony.

Speaking of his day, though, there are elements that have aged less well than others. For example, reference to obscure styles or brands that may have communicated meaning to a British reader of certain class and time period, but which today, in the United States, are empty. There appear occasional authorial techniques to which we have become unused, such as reversion to the present tense to describe a scene in which a past tense event takes place, as though the author has taken the reader aside for a moment to explain the layout of the neighborhood.

But it isn’t the anachronisms that linger in my mind at the conclusion of the story. It’s the characters. In this relatively brief text, Le Carre’ sketched human beings of compelling complexity and tragedy. The book is thin on kinetic, gun-slinging adventure, and long on human drama. It’s a superlative demonstration of effective exposition and internality. The solutions to the ultimate mystery depend partly on tradecraft, but more significantly on the humanity of the participants. If anything, Le Carre’s work is a study, not in action, but in characterization.

Bottom line: This was a hoot, and I’m off to get the next book in the series.



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