John Le Carré x2
Jan. 8th, 2013 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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Date: 2013-01-08 08:08 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-01-08 08:35 am (UTC)Also, have added review of 3 of my current m/m binge. What are yours?
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Date: 2013-01-08 09:00 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-01-08 09:19 am (UTC)I'd read 2 by her before, one I disliked (married politician and campaign organiser get together during election campaign) and one about a threesome that didn't work for me - if I'd remembered that she wrote the politician one I might not have picked this one up (I was trawling through the 5 star reads on jessewave). Have not read anything by R Cooper - others good?
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Date: 2013-01-08 09:27 am (UTC)Did Jessewave rec anyone new? M/m is a limited pool for me now. Damn my binges.
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Date: 2013-01-08 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-09 01:25 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-01-08 03:16 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-01-09 09:01 am (UTC)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.
Oh, that's a shame. Liz didn't do much for me, and there are some odd things going on with the women in A Murder of Quality (well, with the ones who are married - Brim, the war work colleague of Smiley, is single and more interesting), but I was hoping that was the time period and his own marriage having problems, because I actually really liked Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl. On the other hand, I am two-thirds of the way through Len Deighton's Berlin Game at the moment, and the women in that make Le Carré's look functional and three dimensional. Are there spy stories with good female characters? (I read and loved Code Name Verity, but it's not quite the right era).