Paperback, 148 pages
English language
Published Sept. 21, 1981 by BANTAM.
Call for the Dead is John le Carré's first novel, published in 1961. It introduces George Smiley, the most famous of le Carré's recurring characters, in a story about East German spies inside Great Britain. It also introduces a fictional version of British Intelligence, called "the Circus" because of its location in Cambridge Circus, that is apparently based on MI6 and that recurs throughout le Carré's spy novels. Call for the Dead was filmed as The Deadly Affair, released in 1966.
Cornwell-Carré's first novel and the introduction of characters George Smiley, Mundt, and Peter Guillam. As other reviewers have said, it is sort of a murder mystery with spies. It is interesting to see where it all started. The germs of various themes, character traits, and character relationships are here waiting for le Carré to figure out how to develop them.
Awfully boring book. The nature of the spy craft was interesting, but it was a lot of “let me tell you what happened” and not much showing. The “action” scene descriptions were rather dull and incoherent
Well written, easy to read. Plot kept my interest throughout. Nothing to write home about, but an enjoyable experience if you just want a nice little mystery.
"'It's an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley,' she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; 'and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated form the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that's a terrible moment, isn't it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.'"
-pg 21
"He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism."
-pg 124, about George Smiley
This book catches a lot of …
"'It's an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley,' she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; 'and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated form the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that's a terrible moment, isn't it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.'"
-pg 21
"He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism."
-pg 124, about George Smiley
This book catches a lot of flack for not really being a spy novel (it isn't) but that doesn't detract from it's sheer brilliance as a debut. The prose is crisp and (mostly) kinetic and the story is concise without feeling vacant. Really, it's a great read and I found it so interesting to observe these post-WWII characters trying to fit themselves into the world as the Cold War sets in and continues to change everything around them. The way le Carre's frames Smiley's patriotic adulation of late capitalist ideals in juxtaposition to two tragic minority figures is a testament to this novel's ability to stand the test of time, our time anyway.
Really enjoyed this.
short sweat, look forward to the others.
Having enjoyed the 2011 "Tinker" movie so much I wanted to read the book but thought it best to start at the beginning, with this, the first George Smiley book and Le Carre's first novel. Le Carre presents his characters at a certain remove from us so that we want to lean in, as it were, to see them better. He preserves for them a high degree of opacity (like the porcelain shepherdess in a crucial scene) so that their motives, their loyalties -- to nation, party, spouse -- are never quite visible to us, and so what we think we know about them comes from uncertain inference. Suspenseful!
