Call for the Dead

Thanks to a small gap in my reading schedule, I've managed to fit in Le Carré's debut novel Call for the Dead, a short and generally rather enjoyable murder mystery that has the distinction of introducing George Smiley to the world.

The story opens when a promising member of the Foreign Office kills himself shortly after being vetted. Maston, the head of the Circus, believes that the death is a clear case of suicide triggered by the stress of the security review. George Smiley, who conducted the actual interview, can't reconcile the death with his impressions of the man he met and sets about investigating.

The mystery turns on a coincidence involving a particularly archaic device: Smiley is at the dead man's house, interviewing his widow, when the telephone exchange calls with a pre-arranged reminder call. Reasoning that a man intent on suicide is unlikely to arrange for an alarm call for the next morning, Smiley confronts the widow who tells him a clumsy lie, thus confirming that the death was murder and not suicide.

Call for the Dead is interesting because it introduces a number of Le Carre's recurring characters, including Smiley. Of the others, Peter Guillam plays a major role in most of the later Circus novels, Mendel recurs as one of Smiley's confidantes in Tinker, Tailor, while Mundt, one of the villains, goes on to play a major role in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Smiley arrives in the book more or less fully formed. Introduced with a brief biographical sketch, the moments of most insight into his character occur during his interactions with others: interview with Maston, forensically dissected in Smiley's inner thoughts; and his memory of a dinner conversation with Ann, in which he explains the chameleon and armadillo methods he uses to survive interviews unscathed.

The climax is intriguing because it reveals much of Smiley's character and especially, when under pressure, a certain ruthlessness that often goes against his more general feelings. As in Smiley's People when he sacrifices his last illusion, his marriage to Ann, prior to Karla's final deception, Smiley forgets his formerly friendly relations with the head of the East German mission, a man who was once one of his greatest protégé, and strikes out at him. Surviving the encounter, Smiley realises that he is only alive because the memory of their friendship stayed his adversary's trigger finger and berates himself for his own moral failure, even though he himself is alive while his foe is dead.

So, while not perhaps classic Le Carré, the book provides a good introduction to some of his most famous characters and has a nice period feel — the reminder phone call seems like a particularly dated idea, as does the dodgy car dealer with his scrap metal garage set up on a bomb site, while Smiley's contempt for his bureaucratic master, Maston, remains timeless.

This is my brain on graphics

Via matociquala, a graphic representation of my recent brain states. Frankly, I'm extremely disturbed by just how strange I seem to be...

( What I've been journaling about )