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Feb. 25th, 2024 11:41 pmAs part of my Le Carre reading I was strongly recommended The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but also that it included relevant elements from Call for the Dead, so I put both on hold at the library in September or October of last year ... then Call for the Dead showed up for me immediately and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold took forever to come in from the cold, suddenly arrived last week, and immediately sucker-punched me in the chest with a blow so hard that I'm still somewhat winded from it.
And thing about The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is it is not subtle about what its thesis is. It is telling you all the way through. "We're all the same, you know, that's the joke," says an East Berlin counterintelligence operative to a British spy, on page 162 out of 215; I took a picture of the quote because I was like "aha! the thesis of the book!" and then I still got sucker-punched by the blow to the face, the kind of punch where you look back and you're like 'oh Mr. Le Carre was announcing very clearly that he was going to punch me, this fist was traveling in my direction the entire time.' (This, to be clear, is praise.)
The plot? The plot. The plot is that a British spy who lost a lot of agents in West Berlin enters into in an elaborate espionage revenge scheme against his counterpart in East Berlin, who was & is a Nazi, by way of the counterpart's ambitious Jewish second-in-command. There is apparently a famous film version starring Richard Burton, which is great news for me, a person who has spent the past month of Emails from an Actor reading a series of extended meditations on how Richard Burton could, would, and secretly longs to kill a man, since Alec Leamas definitely could, would, and, unfortunately, does.
The beginning of my library copy includes an essay in which John Le Carre patiently explains that after he published the book everyone kept assuming it was true; obviously it was not true or he would not have been allowed to publish it. Nothing worked like this, it's just, also, that everything works like this: "The novel's merit, then -- or its offense, depending on where you stood -- was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing [...] What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own."
I am glad also to have read Call for the Dead first -- which is Le Carre's first book, and most of it almost fits the pattern of a contemporary mystery novel, in which George Smiley Solves a Murder About Espionage, Assisted By a Helpful Normal Policeman. You sort of feel like he's trying to be an ordinary mystery novelist and then as the espionage plot thickens and Smiley is confronted by a former protege/shadow double from East Berlin (the first of many Smiley shadow doubles) it starts to slip sideways into the kind of things that Le Carre really wants to talk about.
But it does give you a sense right off the bat of Smiley as the affable protagonist weary of all the collateral damage of espionage, which is important in Spy Who Came In From The Cold where Smiley is rarely on page but frequently lurking just off-screen ( spoilers )
And thing about The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is it is not subtle about what its thesis is. It is telling you all the way through. "We're all the same, you know, that's the joke," says an East Berlin counterintelligence operative to a British spy, on page 162 out of 215; I took a picture of the quote because I was like "aha! the thesis of the book!" and then I still got sucker-punched by the blow to the face, the kind of punch where you look back and you're like 'oh Mr. Le Carre was announcing very clearly that he was going to punch me, this fist was traveling in my direction the entire time.' (This, to be clear, is praise.)
The plot? The plot. The plot is that a British spy who lost a lot of agents in West Berlin enters into in an elaborate espionage revenge scheme against his counterpart in East Berlin, who was & is a Nazi, by way of the counterpart's ambitious Jewish second-in-command. There is apparently a famous film version starring Richard Burton, which is great news for me, a person who has spent the past month of Emails from an Actor reading a series of extended meditations on how Richard Burton could, would, and secretly longs to kill a man, since Alec Leamas definitely could, would, and, unfortunately, does.
The beginning of my library copy includes an essay in which John Le Carre patiently explains that after he published the book everyone kept assuming it was true; obviously it was not true or he would not have been allowed to publish it. Nothing worked like this, it's just, also, that everything works like this: "The novel's merit, then -- or its offense, depending on where you stood -- was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing [...] What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own."
I am glad also to have read Call for the Dead first -- which is Le Carre's first book, and most of it almost fits the pattern of a contemporary mystery novel, in which George Smiley Solves a Murder About Espionage, Assisted By a Helpful Normal Policeman. You sort of feel like he's trying to be an ordinary mystery novelist and then as the espionage plot thickens and Smiley is confronted by a former protege/shadow double from East Berlin (the first of many Smiley shadow doubles) it starts to slip sideways into the kind of things that Le Carre really wants to talk about.
But it does give you a sense right off the bat of Smiley as the affable protagonist weary of all the collateral damage of espionage, which is important in Spy Who Came In From The Cold where Smiley is rarely on page but frequently lurking just off-screen ( spoilers )
