cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
[personal profile] cyphomandra
I've tried before to read John Le Carré, and stalled out on a number of them before hitting The Little Drummer Girl, which I loved (brilliant, devastating, brilliant). Then I tried some more and after failing to get past the first 50 pages of A Perfect Spy half a dozen times, I gave up. After seeing the movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I thought it was probably time to think about trying again and, eventually, it became a good idea for other reasons.

The spy who cam in from the cold. I read this when I was starting to work on my Yuletide fic, and it was so stunningly good that it made it somewhat daunting to work out how to approach my own story. It’s fast, tense, cynical and a masterclass in how to control reader beliefs and expectations. It’s resolutely unglamorous, and it also uses one of my favourite tropes – agent goes undercover, but their cover story is the wilful destruction of their professional and professional reputations, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get them back. “It was the Berlin wall that had got me going, of course,” Le Carré says in his introduction, and it's the beginning, end, and centre of the story. Amazing book.


A murder of quality. Le Carré’s second book, and actually a detective rather than a spy story, although it is a Smiley book. The editor and problem page author of a small but devoted Christian paper gets a letter from a woman who thinks her husband is going to kill her. The editor (who I kept seeing as a variant on Miss Climpson, from Dorothy Sayers) did war work with Smiley, and takes it to him as the best person to intervene; Smiley makes a phone call, only to discover that the letter writer has just been found murdered. He goes down to the private school where her husband teaches to investigate.

The strength of the book is in its setting, and in the way it explores the particular closed world of a private boys’ school, and what it’s done to the teachers there (the murder case is not its strength, although it does turn on character well). Le Carre has an afterword, written recently, which is satisfyingly scathing about the stranglehold Eton and the like have on the positions of power in the UK. I also like that Smiley, while able to interact in this world (“I met him once at Magdalen High Table,” he says about one of the housemasters) is also aware that he will never fit in, due to his own background, and disadvantaged by this – at one stage the wife of another teacher basically takes him apart, exposing his insecurities and all the ways in which he doesn’t belong, and he has no way to fight back. Again, difficult not to think of Sayers, but different.

Date: 2013-01-08 08:08 am (UTC)
mossybomb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mossybomb
I suspect if I ever read Le Carré (and I strongly doubt I have the attention span for it but you never know), it'll have to be in ebook format. My parents had his books all over the place and I remember trying to read one once and actually losing all sensation in my hands because the thing was so freaking big I couldn't hold it and read it and the same time. I don't think I could even crack the spine. So the association is not a hugely positive one, but TTSS was a pretty amazing movie.

I'm slowly migrating back to books again, btw. Have been on an m/m binge and then I'm going to try this code name verity thing everyone's talking about.

Date: 2013-01-08 09:00 am (UTC)
mossybomb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mossybomb
I read this thing by someone called R. Cooper called 'Play it again, Charlie' which was kind of interesting, so I got a few others of hers. A couple of K.A.Mitchell ones, a Harper Fox, some random freebies from ARE, and a few Lanyon novellas that I hadn't read because I felt like some comfort reads. None of them were spectacular but they were fine for the light reading mood I've been in, though the Cooper was ultra heavy on the angst and foreboding and whatnot.

I'm sort of intrigued by the LA Witt one but I have a feeling I've read something of hers and been underwhelmed by it.

Date: 2013-01-08 09:27 am (UTC)
mossybomb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mossybomb
The other Cooper books? Ehhh... they're okay. Ish. Lots and lots of inner monologue, not all that much dialogue. Slightly repetitive. Lots of angsting, which I liked, but narrative tends to get bogged down in it so you have to be patient. Nice style of writing, though, and the sex is hot.

Did Jessewave rec anyone new? M/m is a limited pool for me now. Damn my binges.

Date: 2013-01-09 01:25 am (UTC)
mossybomb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mossybomb
Oh man you're telling me. One of their 5 star reviews is for a sequel to a book that I would stab in the neck, if book anatomy worked that way.

I think the Jesse part of Jessewave is on Goodreads, and I think they're a guy, but I could be wrong about that second bit. I'm pretty sure I've run into their reviews there, and from memory their recs were fairly decent.

I don't get much of a sense of new, good m/m writers coming through, and all the old ones I've either read or don't hold much for me anymore. Lanyon is apparently coming off his 'sabbatical' this year which may or may not be a good thing.

Date: 2013-01-08 03:16 pm (UTC)
gramarye1971: title card from Spitting Image's Soviet Election Special '87 (Election Specialski)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
I keep meaning to read A Murder of Quality, since I know that Le Carré absolutely loathed his own schooldays and want to see how it comes through in his works. A Perfect Spy is indeed a bit of a door-stopper and somewhat difficult to break into, but I do think it's one of Le Carré's best works (in addition to being his most autobiographical). My other favourite Le Carré book is The Looking Glass War, which to give fair warning has a downer, grimdark ending even by Le Carré's standards -- and yet considering the plot I don't think anyone in there really deserves a happy ending. Not in a Cold War context, at least.

I mostly wish that Le Carré had a better hand at writing female characters who think about something other than sex. His male characters have deep, gripping psychological and emotional dramas; his female characters mostly seem to be facilitating those dramas when they're not too busy fretting about how they're not having enough sex or aren't getting it from the right man or whatever.

Profile

cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
cyphomandra

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
131415 16171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 21st, 2025 10:27 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios