Call for the Dead (1961) (George Smiley, #1) by John le Carré

My second le Carré novel—the author's first—had a notably lighter impact on me than my introduction to the man's work, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Call for the Dead is noteworthy in that it's such a polished first novel. It reads quite quickly and le Carré's prose is surprisingly polished for a new novelist. I suspect the man had been nursing his talent for quite some time, perhaps with other methods. But what made The Spy Who Came In From The Cold so compelling to me—its gritty realism, the undertones of what motivates one to live such a difficult life as one lived by a spy, and its compelling characters—are present here, albeit in early form, somewhat like the tip of the iceberg that would be revealed in the coming, more polished novels in the Smiley series.

George Smiley is the main draw of this novel. Gone are the super-spies we know now—the Bournes and Bonds and various other hip, muscular, shirtless Bees—and we're left with a short, fat, poorly dressed, bespectacled, middle-aged man whose only worthwhile weapon is his mind. Smiley (who made only a peripheral appearance in the other novel I've read) is a joy to read. His analytical mind walks us tradecraft-neophytes through the potential motivations for the people he's examining in a studious, workmanlike manner, and we never feel left out of the know as to why he's performing the actions he is.

Perhaps most enjoyable for me were the asides in which Smiley dipped into his and his adversaries' political motivations for doing what they do. le Carré's characters feel like real people with real wants who end up desperate and trapped in the world in which they've come to reside. The antagonists are not flag-waving Marxists or steel-jawed monsters who kill at whim. The best of them are cold professionals. But more importantly, they're real, disillusioned people doing what they can to enact the drastic changes in the world they'd like to see. This humanity makes them relatable, and even pitiable. Although initially cast as villains; you end up feeling sorry for them rather than rooting against them. And it's a credit to le Carré's skill that this turn never feels cloying nor manipulative. My favorite characters are always those I don't necessarily agree with, but am still capable of empathizing with. And in this, more than nearly anything else in his work, le Carré succeeds.

A young John le Carré

Although I enjoyed it, I think Call for the Dead, overall, does feel a bit thin. There are elements of Smiley's frustration in dealing with the stifling bureaucracy and rampant idiocy within his own organization that immediately interested me but were never touched on again past the first few chapters. And some of the side characters—Guillam, most notably—were left distinctly underdeveloped despite playing a considerable role in the climax, which caused it to lack a bit of the impact it could have had.

When you consider its status as le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead is still quite impressive regardless of these flaws. But rating on its own merit leads me to classify it more as a longish novella than a full novel of its own account. That said, it's a marvelous first effort, and I'll definitely be reading the rest of the George Smiley books. le Carré has me hooked.

⭐⭐⭐

QUOTES LIKED

“But gossip must see its characters
in black and white, equip them with
sins and motives easily conveyed in
the shorthand of conversation.”

“His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.”

“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed.”

“Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective.”

“They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it.”