Books 20 and 21 of 2018

Have for a few years intended to read Le Carre. Call for the Dead has one of those immediately appealing English narrators who pull you up to the fire side and regale you with a finely spun tale. You know the sort of narrator of which I speak. And Smiley is an appealing bumbling sort of wise detective--I'd expected more of a spy/intrigue novel, but this is actually a murder mystery with some espionage overtones.

It's a good time to re-visit this Cold War era, what with a new Cold War in the wings, or perhaps the surprising new end of the Cold War after everyone thought it had already ended? We shall see. But this world of George Smiley and East and West and Iron Curtains and jockeying between Capitalists and Communists is the era in which I grew up, and how odd it is that it feels so distant now.

I found the novel appealing enough to continue with the series of George Smiley books. I like the portrait of England and English class structure after the War as its empire is dismantled and handed over to the Americans. There is the standard upper-crust snobbery and casual homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that of course was a feature of the age, and these features of English society are lampooned by LeCarre as much as recorded by him.

  

This installment is much less engaging than the first. This is more a Gothic mystery/horror tale with a gruesome murder at a decaying prestigious private school. The best bits are a sort of Evelyn Waugh-ish character whose disgust at the English class system and descriptions of its fraudulent institutions is rather amusing. But the plot is awkward and clunky, the characters are types who turn out in the end to not be what they seem a la virtually every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and as Le Carre describes the book in its introduction, there are some good instances of satire but overall it's a failed mystery thriller. I'd agree. But I shall continue with the series despite this disappointment. The end is particularly bad, as all the clues which have pointed one way suddenly are forced to point another and there is a quick arrest and then it just ends.