CALL FOR THE DEAD

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.

An undeniably First novel. Le Carré's skill with words, characters, and politics are evident but not yet in full bloom, while the plot is more reminiscent of a lesser Holmes novella. "This kid's got promise!" is what I'd say if I were a literary critic in the 1960s.

"'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.

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!