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John Le Carre

Started by non capisco, October 04, 2017, 11:24:32 PM

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non capisco

I've somehow got to age 39 without ever reading any Le Carre before this week. Three quarters of the way through 'The Night Manager'. Hey, guys, late review: he's bloody good, isn't he? Compelling storytelling meets impeccable prose. There have been a ton of passages throughout I've wanted to underline and come back to later to savour.

Which of his should I read next? Isn't it great when you start on a popular author, find you love the first thing you read and know there's a hefty catalogue to delve into?

spamwangler

ah man, need to get me some more le carre in my life

Bhazor

Start from the top. Call For The Dead is one of his best and establishes the formula of the classic John Le Carrie era. His later books are still good but they each have flaws most notably long dry openings. The only books I'd say you could avoid without missing much is A Murder of Quality and Single & Single a book I could not force myself to finish.

Neville Chamberlain

I kicked this year off by reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, my first ever John le Carré novel (and I, too, was aged 39 at the time!) and I really enjoyed it, read it in two days flat. Haven't read any more John le Carré since, but that's just because I've got a ton of other stuff to get through...

Serge

The 'Karla Trilogy' of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', 'The Honourable Schoolboy' and 'Smiley's People' are utterly fucking blinding. My personal favourite would be the slightly later 'A Perfect Spy', where he works through a lot of his anger at his father Ronnie through the thinly disguised Rick Pym. When I read Adam Sisman's superlative biography of le Carre, I was staggered at just how little he'd made up.

I'm working my way through the earlier books at the minute - I loved 'Call For The Dead' and 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold', but wasn't keen on 'A Murder Of Quality'. 'The Looking Glass War' was pretty good, too. Once I've gone through the sixties novels, I'll jump forward to the eighties and start filling the gaps - I haven't read anything post-'Night Manager' except the memoir he published last year.

Corky is just as amazing in the book as he was in the TV version of 'Night Manager'.

Norton Canes

Only read The Russia House but consider it added to the 'blindingly good' list.

non capisco

Quote from: Serge on October 05, 2017, 08:43:16 PM
Corky is just as amazing in the book as he was in the TV version of 'Night Manager'.

I missed the TV version but the passage in the book where Corky is casually interrogating the recuperating Pine by his bedside and then suddenly grabs him by the hair is an electric bit of writing. My commute this week reading The Night Manager has been a joy. Really can't wait to read more by him. Cheers for the recommendations, all.

Serge

I have mentioned my favourite Corky dialogue on here before, but will wait until you've finished before I repeat it here. It's better if you come upon it unannounced. It's interesting, as I didn't read it until after seeing the TV version, so I imagined all of his dialogue in Tom Hollander's voice, although I'm not 100% convinced that le Carre wrote it in that tone. But it works!

Similarly, The Great Bernard Hepton actually plays Toby Esterhase wrong in the TV version of 'Tinker, Tailor...', though I imagine that was how he was directed to play it (and, being Hepton, is naturally great whichever way he plays it.)  Esterhase is meant to be Hungarian, but has lived in England for so long that he's now on 'our side'. In the TV Tinker..' he's played as a posh Englishman, but when he appears in 'Smiley's People', he's retired from The Circus and has gone back to his original accent in his new life as an art dealer (although he performs one line in his 'Tinker' voice to make a point.) Having read the books, I can see that he should have been played with a Hungarian accent throughout.

Gwen Taylor on ITV

Quote from: Serge on October 05, 2017, 08:43:16 PM
My personal favourite would be the slightly later 'A Perfect Spy', where he works through a lot of his anger at his father Ronnie through the thinly disguised Rick Pym.

I've read A Call for the Dead, The Spy who Came in from the Cold, The Honourable Schoolboy and A Delicate Truth; A Perfect Spy is by far his best work, it's a spectacular piece of fiction.

Lee Van Cleef

Quote from: Bhazor on October 05, 2017, 12:01:43 AM
Start from the top. Call For The Dead is one of his best and establishes the formula of the classic John Le Carrie era. His later books are still good but they each have flaws most notably long dry openings. The only books I'd say you could avoid without missing much is A Murder of Quality and Single & Single a book I could not force myself to finish.

I really enjoyed A Murder of Quality myself, but then I enjoy a good murder mystery type thing. And yes, start from the top, I wish I had done that instead of starting with ...Cold, as it would have been nice to read that with some more context for Smiley, even though he's not featured in a big way.

I'm about to start the Karla Trilogy myself, and really looking forward to it. Le Carre's style is so austere, I find a curious coldness to his authorial language that so powerfully reflects the complex but somewhat empty world of his characters. I finished The Looking Glass war recently, and even though it didn't entirely satisfy me as a story, it contains some stunning phrasing.

He and Irvin Yalom are two of my favourite writers for the way they use words with a subtle force that hits the core of their (rather different!) subjects.

Bhazor

Quote from: Lee Van Cleef on October 07, 2017, 03:25:11 PM
I really enjoyed A Murder of Quality myself, but then I enjoy a good murder mystery type thing.

My problem with Murder of Quality wasn't the fact it was a murder mystery but the fact it wasn't a very good murder mystery. With a far fetched motive and a flat ending. I do like the idea of Le Carre getting away from espionage and branching into other genres. I think its a shame he hasn't done a straight up Wodehouse style farce in his cold war era style. There's some of that in Looking Glass War but the tone is still very grim and he admits he was very bitter at the time.

Lee Van Cleef

Quote from: Bhazor on October 07, 2017, 03:41:56 PM
My problem with Murder of Quality wasn't the fact it was a murder mystery but the fact it wasn't a very good murder mystery. With a far fetched motive and a flat ending. I do like the idea of Le Carre getting away from espionage and branching into other genres. I think its a shame he hasn't done a straight up Wodehouse style farce in his cold war era style. There's some of that in Looking Glass War but the tone is still very grim and he admits he was very bitter at the time.

To contextualise, I like Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder, my bar for that kind of thing is incredibly low.

The Looking Glass War's farce feels brutally hubristic, I think it's part of the reason I struggled a bit with the general arc, particularly how it affects Leiser.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: Serge on October 06, 2017, 08:42:50 PM
Similarly, The Great Bernard Hepton actually plays Toby Esterhase wrong in the TV version of 'Tinker, Tailor...', though I imagine that was how he was directed to play it (and, being Hepton, is naturally great whichever way he plays it.)  Esterhase is meant to be Hungarian, but has lived in England for so long that he's now on 'our side'. In the TV Tinker..' he's played as a posh Englishman, but when he appears in 'Smiley's People', he's retired from The Circus and has gone back to his original accent in his new life as an art dealer (although he performs one line in his 'Tinker' voice to make a point.) Having read the books, I can see that he should have been played with a Hungarian accent throughout.

Yes to all that. Names are so important in Le Carré's work, and especially in Tinker, Tailor. The foreignness of Esterhase's name marks him out in the same way that Bland's suggests his class. "Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all". His foreign accent would also give context for his pretentiousness and his sometimes chippy attitude.

touchingcloth

I read The Night Manager last week after being reminded of it by this thread. I really enjoyed it, and have moved on to the Tailor of Panama now. It's been a couple of years since I last read any le Carré, but I'd forgotten just how much male gaze there is with character depictions. Men's physical appearances are always described in terms of character traits - suspicious eyes, world-weary stopped backs, lazy shuffles - but women are always introduced by reference to their sexual traits such that the reader knows the size, shape and attitude of every single breast in his books. Someone in TToP is described as having "the firm, high breasts of a sportswoman".

I'm not complaining exactly, I'd just like to see a little more equality. Pine, the Close Observer, had slender, nimble hands which betrayed his violent past, and a lovely tight peach of a bottom that pulled his Jermyn Street slacks taut to accentuate the impressive lump of his penis.

Bhazor

Well The Mission Song does do that. The main character, a black guy, is essentially objectified by his wife including colourful descriptions of his "proud ebony soldier". The constant Gardener also has a major POV character whose a horny milf housewife and every paragraph seems to have some reference to how her houseguest's "cavalier stride" gives her a leaky valve.

Serge

He does have problems writing certain characters that fall outside of his usual 'types'. Working class characters often tend to be gor-blimey-guvnor caricatures, and Mama Low in The Night Manager was borderline racist at times. I don't think he intended that, by any means, and am sure that he was convinced that he'd nailed that character as a realistic Carribbean black man, but eeechhh, it's painful to read.

non capisco

Quote from: Serge on November 05, 2017, 07:40:33 PM
and Mama Low in The Night Manager was borderline racist at times. I don't think he intended that, by any means, and am sure that he was convinced that he'd nailed that character as a realistic Carribbean black man, but eeechhh, it's painful to read.

Gawd yeah. He does the voice, doesn't he? As if it's Ian Fleming times still.

Since starting the thread I've read 'A Delicate Truth' and 'The Looking Glass War', both of which I enjoyed the heck out of, especially the latter. 'A Perfect Spy' up next.

Serge

Ah, you're in for a treat, as I mentioned above that's my favourite. The TV version is pretty good as well, with only one thing letting it down - Peter Egan is completely miscast in the main role. Everyone else is spot on - especially Ray McAnally and Rüdiger Weigang - but Egan just fails to convince as Pym. Le Carre thought it was a disastrous adaptation, which is unfair, as, Egan aside, it's excellent. Though I suppose getting the main character wrong may be enough to call it disastrous. (And Egan's not that bad, he's just not right for Pym. Plus you keep expecting him to go next door and wind up Richard Briers.)



spamwangler

I don't think Steven king's Carrie even NEEDED a reboot, let alone with a french bloke playing the main character. I don't see the point

studpuppet

Talking of adaptations, I absolutely loved the Complete Smiley series that Radio 4 did a couple of years ago with Simon Russell Beale as Smiley. He's channelling Alec Guinness but is different enough for it to be fresh. Also, Smiley isn't 'front-and-centre' in some of the stories so there's plenty of scope for others to shine (Brian Cox and Patrick Malahide spring to mind as I type), but there are plenty of other heavyweights involved. I 'taped' mine off the 'radio' but they're available as download from reputable places or Amazon. Looks like they last aired in 2016, but it wouldn't surprise me if they re-ran them on 4 Extra sometime soon.

touchingcloth

Quote from: studpuppet on November 17, 2017, 11:08:14 AM
Talking of adaptations

And talking of them a bit more, does anyone care to name any decent feature film adaptations of his work? The Smiley TV series were near as damn it perfect, and The Night Manager was excellent, but the only feature film of his I've seen is Alfredson's Tinker Tailor, which after reading the book and seeing the series is a big disappointment. I suspect a lot of his books probably suffer from the same issue of not really being suitable for due to the intricate plotting and subtle details. A folder being snuck out of a library is utterly gripping on the page and small screen, but not so much in the cinema.

studpuppet


Camp Tramp

Quote from: Serge on November 06, 2017, 04:29:58 PM
Ah, you're in for a treat, as I mentioned above that's my favourite. The TV version is pretty good as well, with only one thing letting it down - Peter Egan is completely miscast in the main role. Everyone else is spot on - especially Ray McAnally and Rüdiger Weigang - but Egan just fails to convince as Pym. Le Carre thought it was a disastrous adaptation, which is unfair, as, Egan aside, it's excellent. Though I suppose getting the main character wrong may be enough to call it disastrous. (And Egan's not that bad, he's just not right for Pym. Plus you keep expecting him to go next door and wind up Richard Briers.)

Peter Egan has a history of being miscast in soy adaptions, he played Toby Meres in the big screen Callan,  he wasn't a patch on Anthony Valentine.

Serge

I've still not managed to get around to seeing the film of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold yet. Then again, I only read the book for the first time last year. An interesting film (which gatchamandave recommended to me on this very site) is The Deadly Affair, which is (loosely) based on Call For The Dead, his first novel, and features James Mason as Smiley, though due to legal issues, he's renamed 'Charles Dobbs'. Harry Andrews is great as Inspector Mendel, continually falling asleep at key moments, and Roy Kinnear puts in a great performance in a minor role. It's mostly shot on location in London, and is a great record of how it looked in 1966, and puts the (then-undeveloped) area around Lot's Road power station to good use.

There's a TV version of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in the pipeline, isn't there? Can't find any actual concrete cast members online, though apparently Aiden Gillen is rumoured for Leamas. I wonder who they will get for Smiley? Unless they change it drastically, whoever it is won't be in it for long.

touchingcloth

Idea for a coffee table book: Smiley People. Portraits of and interviews with the men who have portrayed George Smiley on screen, stage and radio.

The drawback is that most of those people are dead now, meaning that all new content would feature almost solely on Gary Oldman, but that's the pitfalls of working backwards from title to concept.

non capisco

'A Perfect Spy' is fucking amazing, isn't it? The sheer anger seeping out of that thing.

Bhazor

I think the Carry On team missed a joke not releasing a spy comedy called Le Carre On. They could have Babs in a comedy Russian accent, Kenneth Williams as Bill Haydon, Charle Hawtrey as Smiley, Hattie Jacques smuggling a comically oversized secret microphone in her bra and a bit where Sid James gets his balls wired to a car battery by his own secret service.

touchingcloth

Paul Feig's Spy is an excellent film, but if he releases a sequel and it isn't along broadly those ^ lines I'll be very disappointed now.