Tag Archives: John Le Carre

I’m a fan of Thorne Smith’s fantasy work but never got around to reading his TURNABOUT until recently. While it’s funny, it’s not up to his best work. It is, however, better than the film adaptation (the source of the cover below).

Smith’s work typically portrayed a bourgeoisie protagonist smothering under his own respectability until magic drags him out of his comfort zone; Topper is the archetype and the Cary Grant film captures the spirit of Smith’s books perfectly. This book is a little different in that the protagonists, Tom and Sally, aren’t as successful. They’re a suburban couple who hover on the brink of becoming a great marriage but can’t quite make it (occasional adulteries aren’t helping). A small Egyptian idol sitting on their shelves turns out to house a minor deity who decides to help them out by transferring them to other bodies.

The results are less a satire of gender (though Sally knows exactly what she’s doing when as Tom, she publicly flirts with one of her lovers) than of the suburbs, from the freeflowing bootleg gin and casual straying to the discomfort at how the couple defy polite convention (Sally’s taken up smoking a pipe). It’s fun, and there’s a great essay by Smith at the end of this edition where he explains that as his books are absurd, trivial and meaningless, they’re just like life, ergo realistic!

Adam Sisman’s THE SECRET LIFE OF JOHN LE CARRE´ shows David Cornwell — the man behind the Le Carré pseudonym was a constant womanizer who cheated serially on his two wives, some of his mistresses, had a menage a trois with a married couple (Sisman speculates he may have hooked up with more men than that) and dropped friends and lovers who got too close, too clingy or too critical of his work. As a Le Carré fan it was interesting to learn how much of his work was based on truth (The Naive and Sentimental Lover was a roman a clef based on the threeway) though it appears in showing many of his protagonists with faithless lives Cornwell inverted reality. Sisman was a Le Carré biographer who had to leave a lot out to get his subject’s cooperation but now that Cornwell is dead …

SHRILL DUSK: City of Magic Book One by Helen Harper has a Manchester gambler discover weird events and strange individuals popping up are a prelude to an apocalyptic rain of magic turning Manchester into a supernatural city where the impossible is easy, her BFF is now a bunyip and she’s suddenly possessed of magical blasting powers. This mercifully avoids the Magic Newbie Gets Heavy Exposition problem though if anything everyone accepts the impossible much too easily. That may reflect this is a spinoff from an established series where we get the explanation why this apocalypse happened (and why one supporting character has the Obviously Significant name Madrona Hatter). Enjoyable overall, though I’m in no rush to get Book Two.

DISCOVERING SCARFOLK by Richard Littler is the bizarre account of a man in the 1970s UK who made the mistake of stopping on his cross-country trip in Scarfolk where everything is illegal (“Whatever you’re going to do, don’t.”), his kids disappear, a monstrous horned beast named Mr. Johnson may be lurking everywhere, the town council hides a sinister monolith and the local magazines offer recipes for things like steak and kid pie. A spinoff from a podcast and partly inspired by books and pamphlets of the 1970s (reworked here into things like The Bumper Book of Disability Jokes), this is bizarre and entertaining.

Having enjoyed HF Heard’s A Taste for Murder (adapted into the TV episode The Sting of Death) I finally ordered a copy of the second “Mr. Mycroft” book, REPLY PAID. Here, Silchester, the twitty narrator of the first book, has leveled up: he now works in Los Angeles solving ciphers and codes for private individuals; despite being a 1942 novel there’s no suggestion of working for the military or any acknowledgement of the war at all. When he tackles one cryptic message for a client, Mycroft (a pseudonym used by a still-under-copyright Sherlock Holmes, not his brother Mycroft) turns up and warns Silchester the code is a clue to a radioactive deposit that the client is willing to kill for (Heard’s description of chain reactions is amusingly off). The mystery here isn’t half as engaging as the killer bees of the first book, and it became a struggle to finish.

HUNGER by Jackie Morse Kessler is a Y/A about a teenage anorexic forced to assume the role of Famine in the Horsemen of the Apocalypse as the price for Death averting her suicide attempt. Anorexic Lisa feels this is ridiculous — she loves food! Doesn’t he realize how much discipline it took her to stop eating a single French fry on her date that evening? — but inflicting the horror of famine on the world soon puts her own mental problems in a different light, not to mention giving her a strong wish to break the deal.

Kessler does a good job capturing Lisa’s delusional sense of her bloated self and doesn’t pretend beating her illness will be easy. I’m also pleased that she doesn’t try to get clever or satirical with famine, showing instead that for millions of people food insecurity is a life and death issue. The ending, however, still disappointed me, though I won’t give any spoilers. In case you’re wondering, the Teen Titans cover here is for a story where the Titans also battle the four riders.

Kim Philby, legendary Soviet mole in British intelligence, is one of those people I know of but not about which led me to pick up A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre. The book looks at the double agent through the prism of his friends — Philby, a charmer, had many — particularly his BFF Nicholas Elliott, who met Philby in WW II and remained blind to his duplicity for the next two decades (John Le Carré interviewed Elliott in The Pigeon Tunnel, a meeting also printed in the back of Macintyre’s book).

Macintyre shows that MI6 in that era was too much a tight circle of friends, the Right Sort recruited from the Right Schools and therefore quite above suspicion. A good, dramatic tale with some odd six degrees of kinship (Peter Ustinov and the drummer for the Police both had parents who moved through Elliott and Philby’s orbit).

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AGENT RUNNING IN THE FIELD was John Le Carré’s final novel (he wrote Silverview much earlier), focusing on Nat, an agent handler recently returned to London from years working for MI5 abroad. His wife Prue worked with him but now she’s free to resume her old career as an activist lawyer while Nat settles in as head of a minor London station, relaxing by playing badminton at his local country club. In one plotline, one of Nat’s underlings proposes a sting on a well-connected Russian oligarch; in the other, he befriends Ed, a skilled badminton player eager to take on the local champ.

Surprisingly the two plotlines don’t really knit together except by coincidence, but the book still works. It has a lot of the author’s post-9/11 anger, this time directed at the US for electing Trump and the UK for signing off on Brexit. It also has probably the happiest marriage of any of Le Carré’s protagonists. If not one of his classics, certainly a solid finish to his career.

QUEEN OF NONE by Natania Barron is well executed but not my sort of thing — grim, gritty takes on Camelot don’t work for me, but that’s not her fault. The protagonist, Anna, is a twin sister to Arthur (referenced in passing by Geoffrey of Monmouth), cursed by Merlin to be queen of none, forever forgotten. After years enduring her marriage to King Lot she’s returning as a widow to Camelot where her half-sister Morgan recruits her for schemes against Merlin and Arthur marries her to Lancelot for his own scheming motives. Like I said, not right for me but it’s personal preference not for any flaws in the book.

THREADS OF LIFE: A History of the World Through the Eye of A Needle by Clare Hunter looks at how embroidery, sewing and needlework have, at various points in history, been status symbols, works of art, protests (women ranging from slaves to Japanese POWs using needlework to express their rage at imprisonment), gendered (after embroidery stopped being an upper class status symbol it became Ordinary Women’s Work), deeply traditional and occasionally magical. Unfortunately Hunter recounts this in a plodding style with too many personal reminiscences, plus the book is devoid of illustration (she does throw in a list of online sources at the end). Informative but sub-par.

William O’Farrell’s REPEAT PERFORMANCE is the basis for the 1947 film, so I’ve long been curious to read it. The recently reissued novel has a man running from the cops after murdering his lover (they gender-flipped the lead role for the film), thinking that if he could just get this past year to do over, he could change everything .. and then it happens (unlike the movie it’s not on New Year’s Day and it ends up ambiguous whether it was all in his head). Now he has a chance to avoid his affair, prevent his unstable wife’s suicide, stop his cross-dressing buddy from getting committed … but of course, things don’t work out that easily.

The protagonist is considerably less innocent than in the film though not everything that goes wrong is his fault. It’s quite obvious, for instance, that his wife is taking a long walk on a short pier regardless of what he does (and cheated on him first). Overall satisfactory but the ending disappoints — I think I get what O’Farrell was going for but it doesn’t quite work.

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A CYCLE OF OUTRAGE: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s by James Burkhart Gilbert looks at the conviction American society was under siege by youth running wild (teen sex! teen crime!) and that the cause of it was found in popular culture: movies, comic books and rock-and-roll were corrupting America’s youth (part of the issue for intelligentsia taking this line was that national popular culture erased regional, local culture, and didn’t embrace Social Realism the way they thought it should). Gilbert looks at the various movers and shakers from the FBI to anti-comics activist Fredric Wertham and their various efforts to figure out a solution. However as they were frequently at odds with each other (was government censorship the answer?) nothing really developed.

This is very inside baseball in spots, though Gilbert does a good job showing how the crisis was perceived and whether there really was a crisis (statistics aren’t reliable enough to be sure). A brief discussion of Teenagers From Outer Space makes me think the juvenile-delinquent stereotype is the reason for making the ETs teens (whose ruthlessness comes from Bad Upbringing).

TEENAGE CONFIDENTIAL: An Illustrated History of the American Teen by Michael Barson and Steven Heller focuses more on the pop culture side, showing how teens went from cute and wholesome (Andy Hardy, Archie) to Wild And Dangerous, as captured in multiple films, comics and paperbacks. More entertaining than Cycle of Outrage, and I don’t think less deep. Between them they should give me some useful thoughts about how teens are portrayed in movies such as The Blob.John Le Carré’s SILVERVIEW has a businessman turned bookstore owner strike up friendship with Edward, a local gent who has some good advice on how to boost store traffic — and by the way, could I use your computers to do some relevant online research? Unfortunately it turns out Edward has a mysterious past, connections with MI5 and a current project that’s of great concern to the heads of national security … In the introduction, the late novelist’s son says his father charged him with finishing and publishing any leftover material at the time of Le Carré’s death; to his surprise, this novel was finished and polished so he just had to get it to the publisher. I wonder if the issue might have been that his father wanted to add some material: 200 pages is relatively short these days and Edward’s project could have used some explaining. As is, it’s not great but it is good.

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David Cornwell, AKA John Le Carré, died last week at the age of 89.

Despite being an immense fan of his, I don’t think this was exceptionally tragic, except in the sense death is usually tragic. He had a long life, a truly amazing career and his last book, Legacy of Spies proved he still had the touch. As I said at the link, writers returning to the scene of their early classics usually tank, but Le Carré came through.

When I started reading (sometimes, but not usually rereading) Cornwell’s work a few years ago, I fully expected that he’d no longer be cutting edge. Sure, he was more cynical than James Bond, but several spy books I’d read in recent decades showed more cynicism than James Bond. They knew that espionage services included careerists who put personal advancement ahead of the mission, incompetents, and officials who treated ordinary people like pawns. But there was always the hero, standing against them, doing the right thing.

When I read Spy Who Came In From the Cold I realized Cornwell’s cynicism was of a different order. It’s his protagonists who treat ordinary people like pawns, make incompetent decisions or prioritize their careers. Smiley and his boss Control at a minimum put an innocent British woman’s life in danger; at worst, they put her in danger fully knowing she won’t survive.  In Looking-Glass War Control manipulates a branch of military intelligence to eliminate them as potential rivals. Cornwell, an ex-spy himself, rips into British intelligence in countless ways, as only someone on the inside can rip into something.

His 21xt century novels aren’t his best work. After 9/11 his anger at the way intelligence services have been let off the leash with no consequence if they bite someone led to some heavy handed endings (even though I’m sympathetic to his views). But we still got some excellent books such as Legacy and A Most Wanted Man.

Cornwell’s writing is first rate and his characterization ditto, though reading so much in a relatively concentrated span of time makes his tropes stand out (this is true of any writer) such as the protagonist with the dysfunctional marriage, the ne’er do well father and the flamboyant, edgy troublemaker (The Naive and Sentimental Lover, my least favorite of his books, has two out of the three). He can still make those tropes work, like the conniving father in A Perfect Spy, or work against them, like the happily married couple in Our Kind of Traitor.

He was a great talent, and it was a pleasure to read him.

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