Call for the Dead

This was Le Carré's first book; remarkably good for a first effort. The writing is crisp and pointed, with the occasional gnomic utterance.

The character of Smiley is presented in outline in a brief history of his life and further developed in the novel. A don manqué; it is obliquely suggested that he walked away from a fellowship at All Souls, one of the great plums of British academe, to become a spy. A failed marriage that has left deep scarring. Member of an odd club, but not really clubbable. A fascination with eighteenth-century German literature.

Smiley starts in the dark, caught up short. He gradually sorts things out, following tenuous clues and hints, getting it wrong and finally getting it right. A painful (sometimes show more literally) process of piecing together fragments. This is a spy novel that reflects reality a lot more than James Bond. show less

'Call For The Dead', published in 1961, was John le Carré's debut novel. He wrote it while posted to the British Embassy in Berlin, working for the British Secret Service.

This a short novel (167 pages) but it does a very effective job of introducing you to the nuanced world of George Smiley, British spy, while solving a mystery around the apparent suicide of a Foreign Office colleague.

George Smiley is a spy who couldn't be further from the James Bond 007 image. Smiley is short, fat, expensively but badly dressed, bespectacled and in late middle age. Recruited out of University, he created and ran spy networks in Germany before and during the Second World War. When we meet him, he's desk-bound and seen as too old for field work. Le show more Carré does a good job of suggesting, without ever stating, that Smilely is seen as being too old-fashioned for post-war spy work, where political savvy is valued more highly than operational effectiveness. We soon see that Smilely has a disturbing habit of digging for answers long after his masters have found the answer they were looking for.

Even in this first book, John le Carré's writing is captivating. His storytelling is intelligent, articulate and accessible. He builds Smiley's character with deft strokes that display Smiley's trade craft, his class and most of all, his dogged determination to make sense of what he's seeing even when it goes against his own best interest.

As with the spies in Le Carré's later works, Smiley is not a blindly-loyal patriot, convinced that the British are always right. He sees the compromises and the evasions of the politicians and recognises that he has more in common with his opponents that he does with his masters. The content of the story, which involves spies from the GDR, would have been mildly controversial in 1961, when Britain didn't recognise the GDR, the Berlin wall was being built and Britain still had troops on the ground.

There a simple but satisfying mystery at the centre of the novel although I think its main purpose was to introduce us to how George Smilely thinks.

There were a couple of things that marked this out as a debut novel for me. I found the start of the novel a little florid, perhaps trying too hard for a high-flown style but that settled down after a couple of chapters. I thought the inclusion of Smiley's report towards the end of novel as a way of explaining what had been going on was a little clumsy. Despite those things, this was an engaging and memorable read.



I recommend the audiobook version of 'Call For The Dead'. Michael Jayston's narration captures the tone of the text perfectly. show less

The first (short) novel starring his most famous character, the "hunched, frog-like" natural spymaster George Smiley, seen here after his divorce but before he becomes a significant figure in British Intelligence. Smiley's routine interview of an agent denounced as a suspected Marxist triggers that agent's unexpected suicide, leading to the discovery of a deeper conspiracy. What I like about later Le Carré is already visible this early on: his dark, perceptive descriptions of human nature and the moral confusion of the intelligence services. It's also interesting to read a cold war spy story written in the middle of the cold war, by someone who was still working for MI5 when he wrote it.

This is the birth of Smiley as we know him in his later book. Short, fat with a moustache and nearing retirement, Smiley finds himself embroiled in the death of a man, Fennan, that he had just interviewed as a vetting procedure after a complaint.

Maston his chief, 'who wants a K', doesn't want the truth but for Smiley to just clear things up and move on. He can't however and goes to speak to Fennan's widow where stories and timelines start to unravel. The book is more novella than novel length and I did guess what had happened before the ending but was engaged enough not to worry about that.

I loved the first chapter A Brief History of George Smiley as it set out exactly what the title says and whilst you might be thinking why do we have show more this, it is a necessary part of the plot. I can't think of another book where I have been told upfront about the history of the protaganist quite so straightforwardly and I enjoyed it for the context whilst realising its intended relevance as you move through the story. We are also introduced to his rather tricky marriage to Lady Ann who at this point has run off with a Cuban race car driver. By the end of the book he is off to Switzerland to bring her back.

Le Carré's books have always had a focus on class and the morality of the characters and these are reflected in this book as well. Smiley is shown not to come from Eton and so on through his desire to have things done a particular way with the right wine and cutlery in the correct placements. Always a give away of someone who has been shown these things rather than grown up with them and who is quite relaxed about them. Lady Ann does not come across well, with a fair bit of repetition around the fact that no one could believe she was with Smiley, so eleagant and urbane and so unlike Smiley.

Enjoyable but not earth shattering. show less

This book introduces us to the writing of le Carré and to George Smiley, who is SO not James Bond. He is dumpy, humble, mild-mannered, wears glasses....in other words, forgettable. And yet something about George Smiley speaks to me - I like him. His job at MI6 has just taken a strange turn - yesterday he performed a routine security investigation on Samuel Fennan. The interview ended with Smiley assuring Fennan that he had nothing to worry about. So why has Fennan hanged himself? The more that Smiley looks into the matter, the more convinced he becomes that Fennan was murdered.

Although this is not le Carré's best work, it is still fine writing that sets the stage for his very successful series of books featuring George Smiley, the spy show more who is very much a product of both WWII and the Cold War.

"He felt safe in the taxi. Safe and warm. The warmth was contraband, smuggled from his bed and hoarded against the wet January night. Safe because unreal: it was his ghost that ranged the London streets and took note of their unhappy pleasure-seekers, scuttling under commissionaires' umbrellas; and of the tarts, gift-wrapped in polythene. It was his ghost, he decided, which had climbed from the well of sleep and stopped the telephone shrieking on the bedside table...Oxford Street... why was London the only capital in the world that lost its personality at night? Smiley, as he pulled his coat more closely about him, could think of nowhere, from Los Angelos to Berne, which so readily gave up its daily struggle for identity." show less

My first Le Carré and the first in the George Smiley series. This is more murder than spy novel, but still a minor introduction to The Circus that will loom even longer in subsequent Smiley novels.

I came to this book because I love the 1979 BBC TV series "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and also the later 1982 "Smiley's People". Both on YT now and I've watched both multiple times. I selected this as it is the first of the George Smiley books. I was keen to learn more about him from his inception. He is a most intriguing character: smart, moral, indefatigable, wizened, wearied, unattractive, and--in the most interpersonal ways--inept.

It's his relationship with his philandering wife Lady Ann that puzzles him most, and is his possible show more Achilles heel. Indeed, he is described as a "a bullfrog in a sou'wester'" by one of Ann's astonished friends and when they walk down the isle, Smiley himself imagines her kiss will transform him into a prince. Alec Guinness plays Smiley in the series and once you see his perfect interpretation, it is Guinness that you envision always.

I don't feel bad that I didn't figure the mystery all out. In traditional murder mystery fashion, the last chapter is a letter from Smiley to the other involved investigators where he recaps the ultimate correct interpretation of all that transpired. Whew.

Me, I sit back and enjoy the character of Smiley, and let all the twists and turns of the mystery play out, without too much strenuous armchair deducing. In the TV series, the Cold War spying is more challenging, but the casting of all the primary characters is superb so that it is its own joy to behold.

I listened to the audio version, read by Michael Jayston, who played Peter Guillam in the first TV series. It was nice to have that familiar voice connecting back to the experience of watching, being riveted to the series when it aired in the U.S. on PBS. Nostalgic for me, but for any listener, wonderfully done. show less

[a:John le Carré|1411964|John le Carré|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1234571122p2/1411964.jpg]’s first Smiley novel, [b:Call for the Dead|46460|Call for the Dead|John le Carré|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347597241s/46460.jpg|1176737], is an old-fashioned, but well-written, cold war novel, with a spy with a heart at its core. George Smiley is not dashing or cosmopolitan, he is solid and intelligent and feeling; he sees both sides of the picture, but he never wonders which side he is on. He is the man you would wish to have in control of your government, but of course, he is not in control, he is just a factor, one man who tries to do things right and often has to fight the bureaucracy.

We know nothing of one another, show more nothing, Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing.

In so many ways this is true of all of us, and in so many ways it is a necessity for the men who do the kind of work Smiley undertakes. How could you live in the shadows, keep the secrets, and still be open to anyone? And yet, we feel we do know Smiley, because we recognize his loneliness and his decency, and we see him struggle to understand even his adversaries.

I loved Smiley when I first read these stories, what seems like a million years ago. I did not remember any of the content of the story, but found I did remember him, perfectly. I shall love him again, of this I am sure, because he represents what is the finest in the men who put their lives on the line and do abominable jobs to keep the rest of us safe and free.

I have made a start, and I am looking forward to spending a year with Mr. Smiley, the old dear, again. show less