Tag: George Smiley

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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If you have never read anything by John le Carré I would recommend that you begin at the beginning. George Smiley arrived fully formed in John le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead, published in 1961. Everything that was to become so familiar about this much-loved character is there, right from the beginning. We learn how the academically inclined Smiley, who “had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany” was recruited straight from Oxford into the nascent secret service in the 1930s.

He had been let go after a stressful undercover role during the second world war, but recalled to duty in the early days of the cold war. As this novel begins, Smiley is already middle-aged and somewhat at odds with his superiors, a rather marginalised figure. His role in this novel is more that of security officer than spy and may reflect le Carré’s own experiences in MI5. I think he might have had the real-life Portland spy ring, who were arrested at the beginning of 1961, in mind for this tale of spies passing on information in suburban Surrey.  

It’s apparent reading this novel now, that le Carré started his writing career in a very different world from the one we are used to today. It was published a mere fifteen years after the end of the second world war, after all. This is a time when displaced Jewish Germans are worried about the re-arming of West Germany and fear where it may lead. In fact, like so much of le Carré’s earlier fiction, there’s a sense that the real subject here is Germany. After all, Smiley’s love of German literature and language is le Carré’s own.

Smiley is called in to investigate Samuel Fennan, a civil servant who was a communist at Oxford in the 1930s, and who has been anonymously accused of being a spy. Smiley clears him in the vetting interview, but Fennan commits suicide that evening. If he had decided to kill himself, why did the man book an early morning alarm call for the next day?

Fennan’s wife is a concentration camp survivor. A German ex-agent of Smiley’s from the war years turns up in London, with tragic consequences. The introverted and scholarly Smiley may approach the business of counter-espionage as an academic exercise, but here he finds that danger has come to London, in the form of a network of East German spies. He is back in the field once again without leaving home.   

This is a taut, compact and atmospheric novel, only 160 pages or so, written in pin-sharp prose, very different to the more drawn-out style of his later novels. The key themes of loyalty and betrayal that will feature so prominently in the later novels are here. Le Carré’s descriptive talents and gift for believable dialogue are apparent at this early stage and his subtle feel for the nuances of English class distinctions makes its first appearance.

The downbeat atmosphere so associated with le Carré’s fiction is here, too. The only locations are a drab post-war London and its suburbs. It seems to be raining most of the time and the climactic scene takes place in the yellow London fog. Security is depicted as just another branch of the civil service, and a crucial conversation takes place in St James Park, a convenient place for those working in Whitehall to avoid being overheard.

We are told about Smiley’s troubled marriage to the wayward Ann. Characters are introduced who will feature in several future novels, Smiley’s younger colleague, Peter Guillam, and the dogged special branch officer, Mendel.

So much that le Carré was to develop further in later books appears here for the first time. There is Smiley’s prodigious memory, his ability to recall the numbers of all seven cars parked near his home in Bywater Street, Chelsea. The secret service is based in Cambridge Circus, and Guillam refers to it as “The Circus”.  The term “tradecraft”, a le Carré invention, meaning the mechanics of espionage, also originates here.

I am not sure if le Carré originally intended to write another novel about Smiley at this stage, because his career seems to be coming to an end even in this first book and it ends with his future uncertain. Fortunately for us, Smiley did resume his career as an intelligence officer. The events in Call for the Dead have a direct bearing on the plot of le Carré’s hugely successful 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley plays a minor role. Indeed, that later novel is actually a sort of sequel to the earlier one, Another good reason for starting at the beginning, with Call for the Dead.

Age shall not weary them, but perhaps it should

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I once read in an interview with Agatha Christie that she felt she had made a mistake with Poirot and made him too old. He had already retired by the time of his third appearance, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I suppose it never occurred to her that the demands of the public and her publisher meant she would be writing about him for the next fifty years. Poirot therefore had to be permanently suspended in late middle age, while the world he moved through changed around him. This is quite effective; the books set in 1960s England are very different to those set among international travellers in the 1930s.

There are occasional references to his age, though. At the beginning of Five Little Pigs (1942) his would-be client looks at him quizzically. Poirot realises that she thinks he is too old for the job. He explains that the “little grey cells” are still working perfectly. Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) begins with Poirot reflecting on what is now his greatest pleasure, the dining table, and lamenting that there are only three meals in the day. But Christie could never have aged him realistically; He was a first world war refugee, after all, and Captain Hastings was recovering from wounds when Poirot met him. Even if he was only in his forties then, Poirot would have been in his nineties in the books set in the 1960s.

Poirot contrasts sharply with John Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay, who made his first appearance in The Thirty Nine Steps in 1915. He ages realistically over the course of his five adventures and in the last, The Island of Sheep (1936), he has been knighted, become an MP and his teenage son takes an active role. This may have something to do with the fact that in the books set in the first world war, Hannay gains promotion, ending up as a senior officer. You can’t really have a character who progresses up the military hierarchy without them ageing. We can see this in C S Forester’s Hornblower series, where Hornblower starts as a midshipman and ends as an admiral. He must therefore age. Of course, both Hannay and Hornblower are parents, so if they did not age, their children could not, either.

The characters that Christie did age realistically, in a similar fashion to Hannay, are her detective duo Tommy and Tuppence. They first appeared as a pair of bright young things in Christie’s second novel The Secret Adversary (1922). Their final appearance as a married couple of mature years was in the last novel she wrote, Postern of Fate (1973).

John Le Carré had a Poirot-like problem with George Smiley, in that he had been very specific about his age in his first book, which made him a bit too old for the later books. In Call for the Dead (1961), we are told Smiley went up to Oxford in 1925, so he would have been born around 1907. Smiley leaves the secret service at the end of that book; we assume he has returned, because he appears as a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965).

He becomes the central character in Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974), but Le Carré had to change Smiley’s past and knock some years off his age to fit him into that story. Smiley had to be much closer in age to the generation who were at Oxford in the 1930s and still young enough to be forced into premature retirement in the early 1970s. That also made him vigorous enough to appear in the next two books of the Karla Trilogy. Again, one has to assume that when Le Carré wrote Call for the Dead, he did not imagine Smiley as the central figure in a much longer and more complex novel that he would write almost fifteen years later.

Perhaps Ian Fleming came up with the best solution to this ageing problem. James Bond always seems to be about the same, unspecified age; mid to late thirties perhaps, old enough to be experienced and confident but young enough to be fit and tough. But the books link in to one another, with a consistent cast of characters. There is a chronology, and Bond is scarred by his experiences, but he is oddly ageless.

This can be seen particularly towards the end of the series. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) opens with the hunt for Blofeld, the criminal mastermind behind the atomic bomb plot in Thunderball (1961). At the beginning of You Only Live Twice (1964), the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have left Bond a broken man, on the point of being dismissed from the service; by the end, he is missing in Japan, presumed dead. The Man With The Golden Gun (1965) opens dramatically with the brainwashed Bond returning to try and assassinate M. He is then given a dangerous mission to redeem himself.

Fleming was careful never to pin down Bond’s exact year of birth. In the (premature, as it turns out) obituary in You Only Live Twice, M writes that Bond became a commando “in 1941, claiming an age of 19”; that would make Bond’s year of birth about 1923 or so. So, if we do apply realistic time, he would have been in his early forties when he turns down a knighthood at the end of The Man With The Golden Gun, the last Bond book.

Sooner or later, Fleming would have had to solve the problem of how Bond should age, and it’s interesting to speculate what he might have done. Perhaps he would have inserted an earlier adventure into the timeline, as Conan Doyle did with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, Fleming died at the comparatively young age of 56. Like his creator, Bond never had to cope with old age.