Tag Archives: England

Call For the Dead by John le Carré

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Call For the Dead was John le Carré’s first novel. He wrote it while still an employee of MI6, the British version of the CIA. It’s an entertaining mystery story about spies and murder that introduces the character of George Smiley, the “little fat man, rather gloomy,” who is the hero of Le Carre’s later novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

We also meet other characters who will return in later novels: the younger, suave Peter Guillam; the police officer Mendel; and the high-level civil servant Maston, later known as Lacon. Unfortunately, we don’t meet Smiley’s ex-wife Ann, although her words do appear a few times.

It’s a short novel, but quite good. My only problem was wondering how Smiley survived several blows to the head with a lead pipe, and why the police weren’t immediately summoned at a climactic moment. But if Smiley had died, or the police had been called, Call For the Dead would have been even shorter.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

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Middlemarch is a great novel. Daniel Deronda isn’t.

I read Daniel Deronda because I enjoyed Middlemarch so much. This seemed like a good idea for a while, because the early chapters of Daniel Deronda focus on Gwendolen Harleth. She is a self-centered, lively young woman with a gift for repartee and a strong desire to be independent. Unfortunately, the focus eventually moves to the title character, a serious young gentleman who never knew his parents and is unsure of his life’s purpose.

Gwendolen isn’t a saint. Daniel is. He rescues a saintly Jewish woman named Mirah, whose saintly brother is a scholar and passionate Zionist. Gwendolen marries an unpleasant, controlling aristocrat, to her regret. In her misery, she seeks advice from Daniel and falls in love with him. But Daniel has fallen in love with Mirah. 

Daniel, with the help of Mirah’s brother, does find his life’s purpose. But I didn’t care about Daniel, Mirah or her brother. I was rooting for Gwendolen.

The novel is saved somewhat by Eliot’s beautiful language and her frequent commentary. For example:

And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of her — often wondering what were his ideas ‘about things’, and how his life was occupied. 

But … it was as far from Gwendolen’s conception that Deronda’s life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

… it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed.

They must be rather old and wise persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about themselves reflected in other minds.

But it probably would have been better to read Middlemarch again.

London 1927: a Respite from Scandals, Real and Fake

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Here’s a brief color film showing London in 1927. It’s part of the British Film Institute’s collection. Someone added New Age-ish music. 

It’s a sure-fire distraction from fake scandals (Benghazi, the IRS) and real ones (spying on the Associated Press, cutting government spending during a recession).

http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/1927_london_shown_in_moving_color.html

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

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Reading The Emigrants is a strange experience. It is fiction that reads like non-fiction. The novel tells the story of four unrelated people who emigrated from Germany during the 20th century, but it is written in the first person, as if the narrator is recounting these people’s experiences based on his own research. In addition, there are photographs scattered throughout the book that seem to represent the characters and settings that Sebald describes in an apparently realistic way.  

The paperback edition of the book indicates that many early reviewers considered the novel to be a masterpiece. I enjoyed Sebald’s later novel The Rings of Saturn more. I didn’t find the characters in The Emigrants especially interesting. Perhaps the reviewers were influenced by the newness of Sebald’s technique. They must have been impressed by his prose. The English translation is spare and often matter-of-fact but always beautiful. (6/30/12)

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

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Rogue Male, a novel published in 1939, isn’t about an elephant on the loose. It’s about a wealthy English nobleman who is a famous adventurer and apparently a big-game hunter. He decides to stalk the leader of a foreign country, supposedly not to assassinate him, but to see if an assassination would be possible. The Englishman, who is never named, is captured before he decides whether to pull the trigger. 

The foreign leader is never named either, but his country borders Poland, so it’s apparently Hitler. The Englishman is tortured and left for dead but escapes, eventually making his way back home. Unfortunately, he has to keep running, because the bad guys, not having found his corpse, are looking for him. So, eventually, are the police. Most of the novel takes place in the English countryside, and, surprisingly, underneath it. Once again, the hunter has become the hunted (hunters should be used to that by now). 

I heard about this novel because it’s one of the out-of-print books that the New York Review of Books has been reissuing. It’s a terrific adventure story and has been filmed twice. As with most adventure stories, it isn’t quite plausible, but it would be interesting to see a film version, or try to write one.  (5/17/12)