Call for the Dead by John Le Carré

I have nowhere to go from here but forward.

I've been reading Le Carré's early novels in a weird sequence - first (ten years ago), understandably, the famous one, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then the book before that, A Murder of Quality, and then the book after that, The Looking Glass War.

I seem to be keeping that pattern, since I've now read Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead. So I suppose I'm now in for A Small Town in Germany and then moving forward like a normal reader.

And the first thing I realized from Call is that Murder was entirely a one-off. From things I'd read, I thought it and Call for the Dead were mysteries involving a spy (Le Carré's series character George Smiley), but Call is a novel of spycraft and working government departments. Only Murder is the outlier, as far as I've seen.

I still think a fair bit of Le Carré's initial motivation was to write against the mythologizing of Ian Fleming and his followers; he presents Smiley here as nearly a failure as a man and a professional, with a badly broken marriage behind him (as an introduction, in the first chapter) and a job where's he's at best stagnated. He's smart and incisive and good at what he does, but his world was tawdry to begin with and his piece of it is dwindling as he grows older and the glories of The War dwindle ever further in the background.

Early Le Carré is largely about The War, I'm coming to believe. I wouldn't think something fifteen years in the past would loom so large, but it does, doesn't it?

Smiley recently interviewed a Foreign Office functionary - Samuel Fennan, an up-and-comer with a high-level security clearance - about rumors he'd been in the Communist Party as a youth. Smiley liked Fennan, and told him this was routine, and that he saw no problems and would be saying so in his report. In the words of a later generation: a nothingburger.

Fennan is now dead, in what I'm afraid I have to signpost by calling an apparent suicide. (But all suicides are apparent in mystery novels, aren't they? And a fair number of apparent murders are actual suicides, too.) Smiley needs to rush to Feenan's place, in the middle of the night, and talk to his widow, who discovered the body.

I've already called this a novel of spycraft; so I've given that part away. There is spying going on, and Feenan was connected to it. Further than that, I'll leave to other readers to discover by reading - this is a short novel, but a twisty, thorny one, filled with Le Carré's wit and careful mid-century British phrasing. Smiley does end up chasing a spy ring, and, I suppose, solving a murder along the way - but the point is the spycraft; that's his job and he's good at his job.

If you want to read Le Carré, I coming to think you might as well start at the beginning. I read these first four novels out of order, but they're all strong, they're all in the same voice, and I expect they work better read in the correct sequence. So start here: even sixty-plus years later, it's tight and precise and icy, in ways I'm coming to think is characteristic of everything Le Carré did.