1AnnieMod
We are starting 2025 with John le Carré (1931–2020), a British author known mostly for his espionage novels - both his George Smiley series and quite a few standalones.
A few years ago I started the series from the beginning, then got distracted and never got to the actual espionage novels - the first 2 in the series are mysteries (so if you are reading him for the spy novels, you either should skip there or set your expectations accordingly).
So... what are you reading to start the year? :)
A few years ago I started the series from the beginning, then got distracted and never got to the actual espionage novels - the first 2 in the series are mysteries (so if you are reading him for the spy novels, you either should skip there or set your expectations accordingly).
So... what are you reading to start the year? :)
2Tess_W
Only ever read one Le Carre before (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) and for me, just so-so. I'm not much of a spy/espionage reader. However, a friend of mine is going to loan me The Constant Gardener. She said she didn't feel as if it was hard core espionage.
3DAGray08
This will be my first experience with Le Carre and I hope to read 2 or more. Beginning with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the one friends who read espionage thrillers seem to recommend the most.
4Bookmarque
I have a couple unread hardbacks kicking around The Night Manager and Absolute Friends so should really get to one of those.
5Tess_W
The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre I listened to this on audio and I'm glad I did because I don't think I could have kept reading such a slog-fest! SPOILER: This is Le Carre's indictment of corporate greed set in Kenya. Justin Quayle was a British diplomat who uncovered a multinational pharmaceutical company's illegal drug trials on unsuspecting Africans. Quayle's wife knew too much and so was "eliminated." The pacing was soooo slow! I'm not a spy thriller/espionage reader to begin with, and this book further confirmed my dislike for that genre. 576 pages
6john257hopper
I always feel I should like John le Carre but somehow I don't get on with his writing style. I've read probably the two most famous ones, Spy Who Came in from the Cold which was only so-so, and, after his death four years ago, Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy which I gave up on. Not sure what I'll try this time.
7AnnieMod
>6 john257hopper: The Night Manager or The Constant Gardener maybe. And if someone feels like watching something, I found The Night Manager TV Series to be very well done.
8MissWatson
A few years back, I acquired all the George Smiley books I didn’t own yet and started (re-)reading them in chronological order. I have now finished The Looking Glass War, published sixty years ago this year.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this at first, it is such a relentless demolition of the espionage business as a noble calling. It has all of Le Carré’s careful detailing of the inter-office rivalries, petty jealousies, the us and them antagonisms, the bleakness and the futility are ruthlessly shown. That is always what he does best, in my opinion, laying bare the workings of the machine, the incredible bureaucracy involved which seems to overshadow everything else.
Looking it up after finishing, I learned that he wrote it as a reaction to the success of the previous book, which so many of his readers misunderstood as a romantic image of spying. Well, he definitely succeeded here with excising romanticism.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this at first, it is such a relentless demolition of the espionage business as a noble calling. It has all of Le Carré’s careful detailing of the inter-office rivalries, petty jealousies, the us and them antagonisms, the bleakness and the futility are ruthlessly shown. That is always what he does best, in my opinion, laying bare the workings of the machine, the incredible bureaucracy involved which seems to overshadow everything else.
Looking it up after finishing, I learned that he wrote it as a reaction to the success of the previous book, which so many of his readers misunderstood as a romantic image of spying. Well, he definitely succeeded here with excising romanticism.
9john257hopper
I decided to read A Murder of Quality and I am enjoying it somewhat more than the others.
10AnnieMod
>9 john257hopper: It is a straight mystery - so if spy fiction is not your thing but British mysteries are, it is bound to work better. :)
11john257hopper
>10 AnnieMod: indeed, though I do normally like spy fiction, actually, though :)
12AnnieMod
>11 john257hopper: Well, his style of spy fiction then. :) There are authors who should work for you on paper but something somewhere just never clicks.
13john257hopper
I completed A Murder of Quality this lunchtime and I quite enjoyed it. I found the resolution to the plot slightly confusing, and I thought the overall feel of the novel was like a Golden Age whodunnit by Agatha Christie rather than one set around 1960.
14AnnieMod
>13 john257hopper: That made me laugh: part of my review from 2012: "...it is almost an Agatha Christie kind of book - a lone detective that exercises his gray cells." :)
15AnnieMod
Meanwhile, I finished reading the first 3 novels in the series in a handy omnibus I had on my shelves (Three Complete Novels: Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and I even wrote some thoughts about them:
While belonging to the same series, these 3 novels cannot be more different.
The first deals with spies but has a murder mystery at its heart (until it turns into a spy novel), the second is a straight mystery - very English and proper, and the third is a classic spy novel (you really cannot get more classic than that). Overall they show an author getting more confident in his craft and developing a style that people either love or hate.
George Smiley is an unlikely hero - he is almost retired at the start (and completely retired by the end of the first novel), he is not handsome or rich and he is not in control of anyone. In the third novel he does not even show up properly - we get a glimpse of him here and there but for the most part, he is behind the scenes. And yet, it is unquestionably a Smiley novel.
In his introduction to the second novel, Otto Penzler points out that despite most of the novels being espionage novels, Smiley is primarily a detective - his methods are closer to those of a detective than the spies that come before him. That's not far from the truth - especially in the first 2 novels here but also later.
In the first novel, a man dies when he really should not have and Smiley goes investigating. There was an interview, it all ended well - and yet the man killed himself. Everyone is ready to close the book on that but Smiley knows that something is just wrong so off he goes, often against the orders of his own department, untangling a death that just does not make sense. The first half of the novel is pure detective procedural; it is just the later chapters that bring the story back into the espionage circles. Along the way we meet a lot of the supporting characters of the series to come -- all the backstory needed for all of them gets tucked into this book so they can emerge and help when needed later.
But it will be later - because A Murder of Quality finds Smiley retired and on an errant for a friend - a letter by a woman who is afraid that she will be murdered turns into a murder and Smiley is off to a small village to investigate. It is an old fashioned British mystery - with the village and the public school next door (in Britain that means private and very expensive...) and two communities which never merge and meet. And yet, they somehow managed to.
And then comes The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - the novel that made le Carré's name. It is a espionage masterpiece in more than one way although it can also be frustrating if one expects action - the only action we really get is in the first and last chapters (both chapters at the Wall); for most of the novel we get secrets, plotting and never knowing what anyone knows or what the truth may be. Even knowing the twist at the end does not take away from the novel's magic (although not knowing it will make it a different kind of reading). And Leamas is even more unlikely hero than Smiley - and yet, he is the only type of a spy who could have pulled off the whole thing. It is almost the opposite of a Bond novel - where Bond is all flash and action; this one is all plotting and carefully constructing the truth.
Overall a good start of the series - not perfect but enjoyable and I am curious to see where le Carré goes next.
PS: Earlier (2012) reviews of the first 2 books if someone feels like reading:
Call for the Dead: https://www.librarything.com/work/4815/reviews/81411542
A Murder of Quality: https://www.librarything.com/work/215214/reviews/81638400
While belonging to the same series, these 3 novels cannot be more different.
The first deals with spies but has a murder mystery at its heart (until it turns into a spy novel), the second is a straight mystery - very English and proper, and the third is a classic spy novel (you really cannot get more classic than that). Overall they show an author getting more confident in his craft and developing a style that people either love or hate.
George Smiley is an unlikely hero - he is almost retired at the start (and completely retired by the end of the first novel), he is not handsome or rich and he is not in control of anyone. In the third novel he does not even show up properly - we get a glimpse of him here and there but for the most part, he is behind the scenes. And yet, it is unquestionably a Smiley novel.
In his introduction to the second novel, Otto Penzler points out that despite most of the novels being espionage novels, Smiley is primarily a detective - his methods are closer to those of a detective than the spies that come before him. That's not far from the truth - especially in the first 2 novels here but also later.
In the first novel, a man dies when he really should not have and Smiley goes investigating. There was an interview, it all ended well - and yet the man killed himself. Everyone is ready to close the book on that but Smiley knows that something is just wrong so off he goes, often against the orders of his own department, untangling a death that just does not make sense. The first half of the novel is pure detective procedural; it is just the later chapters that bring the story back into the espionage circles. Along the way we meet a lot of the supporting characters of the series to come -- all the backstory needed for all of them gets tucked into this book so they can emerge and help when needed later.
But it will be later - because A Murder of Quality finds Smiley retired and on an errant for a friend - a letter by a woman who is afraid that she will be murdered turns into a murder and Smiley is off to a small village to investigate. It is an old fashioned British mystery - with the village and the public school next door (in Britain that means private and very expensive...) and two communities which never merge and meet. And yet, they somehow managed to.
And then comes The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - the novel that made le Carré's name. It is a espionage masterpiece in more than one way although it can also be frustrating if one expects action - the only action we really get is in the first and last chapters (both chapters at the Wall); for most of the novel we get secrets, plotting and never knowing what anyone knows or what the truth may be. Even knowing the twist at the end does not take away from the novel's magic (although not knowing it will make it a different kind of reading). And Leamas is even more unlikely hero than Smiley - and yet, he is the only type of a spy who could have pulled off the whole thing. It is almost the opposite of a Bond novel - where Bond is all flash and action; this one is all plotting and carefully constructing the truth.
Overall a good start of the series - not perfect but enjoyable and I am curious to see where le Carré goes next.
PS: Earlier (2012) reviews of the first 2 books if someone feels like reading:
Call for the Dead: https://www.librarything.com/work/4815/reviews/81411542
A Murder of Quality: https://www.librarything.com/work/215214/reviews/81638400
16MissWatson
I have finished a re-read of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, after decades, and was glad to see that it held up to my memory. I was also surprised how much of it I remembered. Don’t know if I can manage the next in the series this month, though...
17MissWatson
Well, I did finish The Honourable Schoolboy on the last day of the month, burning the midnight oil because I needed to know how it ended...
This gets off to a slow start with Smiley and a small handpicked team going through the archives, hunting for something with which to buy their way back into the trust of their masters. The trail leads to Hong Kong, and once he has an agent in the field the pace quickens considerably, with Wetherby traipsing all over South East Asia. I really like the way he juxtaposes the calm world of the desk pushers and their planning with the action going on in the real world, where humans provide an uncalculable factor and things run out of control. I also think it’s clever to keep Peter Guillam on hand who probably is often quite as bewildered by Smiley as the reader is.
I do wonder about the narrator, though: whom is he addressing? (Given that this was written in 1977 and that Whitehall is such a men’s bastion, we may safely assume he is male.) He has access to all the files and is reviewing Smiley's work after the event, to what purpose? I suppose I need to read the next one and hope he’ll tell us.
This gets off to a slow start with Smiley and a small handpicked team going through the archives, hunting for something with which to buy their way back into the trust of their masters. The trail leads to Hong Kong, and once he has an agent in the field the pace quickens considerably, with Wetherby traipsing all over South East Asia. I really like the way he juxtaposes the calm world of the desk pushers and their planning with the action going on in the real world, where humans provide an uncalculable factor and things run out of control. I also think it’s clever to keep Peter Guillam on hand who probably is often quite as bewildered by Smiley as the reader is.
I do wonder about the narrator, though: whom is he addressing? (Given that this was written in 1977 and that Whitehall is such a men’s bastion, we may safely assume he is male.) He has access to all the files and is reviewing Smiley's work after the event, to what purpose? I suppose I need to read the next one and hope he’ll tell us.
18SassyLassy
I read A Legacy of Spies wherein Peter Guilliam is hauled out of retirement to come back to London to be interrogated about the events in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
