Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John le Carré

Ms Oh Waily2 Comments

Book #339

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

I can hardly believe that it has taken me so long to read this classic of the spy fiction genre.  Happily I have now done so.

Published in 1974, this wonderfully readable novel of Cold War espionage was written with a backdrop and intimate knowledge of the Cambridge Five and the workings of MI6.

A British field agent, Ricki Tarr, has a romantic liaison with a disillusioned Russian counterpart while in Hong Kong.  They meet several times over a short period but things go awry when she misses a pre-arranged meeting, and the agreed upon fallback.  Like all people in their line of work, they have drop spots and Tarr finds his lover has left an intriguing written account that indicates that ‘the Circus’ has a Moscow-run mole deep within.  Tarr takes this to his immediate superior and this brings in the head of the Civil Service responsible for the Intelligence Services and the ex-Deputy Head of the Circus, George Smiley.

Once Smiley is tasked with identifying the mole, the narrative switches between flashbacks and past events as told through Smiley’s own memory, current events as he pursues his covert investigations, and back to the past in the documents he reads and the stories extracted from the ex-Circus staff members he interviews.  We learn about the main characters, Jim Prideaux, Percy Alleline, Roy Bland, “Control”, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon and George Smiley through the investigative process.  As befits a novel of this nature, the mole “Gerald” is revealed at the very end.  However, I’m sure most of us would come to the correct conclusion a short while beforehand or at very least have a strong suspicion that we simply need to have confirmed by the author.  This would also apply to the final few actions and outcomes of the novel, but does not take away from the manner of the storytelling which maintains a strong degree of tension for the majority of the book.

It is the first novel of the Karla trilogy, involving Smiley’s attempts to follow the trail of his nemesis and Soviet spymaster, Karla.  It is the fifth novel of seven to feature George Smiley.  The second book in this series is The Honorable Schoolboy, which despite being awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize* in 1977 does not make the 1001 Book List, yet the final book in the series does – Smiley’s People.  Really. Sometimes it makes you wonder.

I enjoyed the small mentions of “Kim” and “The Great Game”, almost as parallels to the Cold War espionage of Smiley’s time.  I would have missed the connection had I not already read Kipling’s work and learned from that the long background of Imperial expansion, influence and British vs Soviet/Russian rivalries.  I also especially liked the evocative jargon for various aspects of the trade; after all you can’t go wrong with a novel littered with terms like: the Circus, lamplighters, pavement artists, scalp-hunters, baby-sitters, janitors, inquisitors, wranglers, reptile fund, and Persil**.

I can happily recommend this for a bit of light, yet highly entertaining reading.  It has intrigue, tension, and I think it will keep you in its grip almost to the end.  The fact that it is based, loosely or otherwise, on real people and similar events only adds to its charm. The only part of the whole story that perplexed me was Smiley’s dysfunctional relationship with his wife.  Perhaps I need to read the prior books to understand that better.  Equally good for your summer holidays, or curling up with on a winter’s evening.  Enjoy.

—
* this literary prize offers yet more reading options, should you be hard up for choice, as I’m sure you wouldn’t find Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man floating around on two many modern reading lists.

** for appropriate explanations of these terms, a quick visit to the Wikipedia entry for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will put you straight, just be careful to avoid spoilers – including the section on background which gives away “Gerald”.

The Sorrow of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

inspirationalreadsLeave a comment

Book #959

Reviewer: Arukiyomi  (first published June 2012)

Heard that this is one of the most accessible Goethe’s and so it made sense to start with it. I’ve not read any of the German classic writer before. How was it? It was okay, but my reading of it was somewhat tainted by having already read Armstrong’s Conditions of Love in which he illustrates archetypal romance and infatuation with reference to Werther.

That Armstrong would do this illustrates the legacy of this short novel. It’s depiction of the dramatic and extreme emotions that Werther goes through were a break with tradition at the time of Goethe’s Germany. If Werther’s behaviour seems extreme to us now, they probably seemed even more so to Goethe’s contemporary readers.

That’s not to say that his readers could not relate to the character of Werther in real life. After all, the novel is based, in part, on Goethe’s own romantic experiences. I think what made the book revolutionary was that someone was putting it down in print and being so frank about it. The literary age was dominated by a conservatism in feeling that made Goethe’s work a sensation. Even Napoleon loved praised it and we all know how hard a man he was to please.

The novel has definitely lost some of its original impact. Of that there is no doubt. Readers ignorant of its place in the history of the novel will be tempted to just say it is yet another overblown romance. I certainly was.

But the novel is worth reading more than simply for its place in history. Werther lives in all of us as we get caught up in feelings that make rational sense to us while all around us people think we’re off the wall. And his solution to the dilemma of unrequited love is something I think most of those honest enough to admit would say we ourselves have considered from time to time. If we haven’t, we’re either lying or not really allowing ourselves to experience life to the full.

And that’s where the novel makes an important contribution to our world, questioning as it does so, the notion that we are in control and that by attempting to be so, we are somehow able to actually live. I very much appreciated this challenge.

The Hours – Michael Cunningham

Ms Oh Waily1 Comment

Book # 89

Reviewer: Beth, of Beth’s List Love (First published August 2012)


I just finished Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. This was a complicated read for me because it carried so many echoes of important pieces of my own life. I’m a psychologist, and I treat depression fairly frequently. Often it feels manageable, and I feel confident that our psychiatrist and I can help people reconnect fully with life. But there are patients with whom the physical grip of the illness feels too powerful, and it becomes literally a life and death battle to discover a way to help the patients wrest their minds from the conrol of the illness. In addition, early in my career, I worked almost entirely with HIV patients. From 1991 to 1996 volunteered at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in NY facilitating a group for men with AIDS. Until about 1995, an AIDS diagnosis was almost certainly a death sentence, with potential significant brain damage from opportunistic infections possible on the way. In the mid 90s, protease inhibitors began to turn things around. For those not too far damaged by infections, the reduction in viral load was able to make HIV into a more manageable chronic condition. The emotional complexity of this time was tremendous. Circles of friends already savaged by the disease had to make sense of the new possibility of hope and a resumption of fairly normal life for some, but the tragic reality that discoveries came too late to save the minds or lives of others equally precious. The work I did at GMHC is still the most moving work I have ever done. I loved and lost some tremendous people in those years, and at times the work was a powerful mixture of crystalline awareness of the beauty of life and its simple moments and tremendous despair at the devastation I bore witness to daily.

I think I may be the only person I know who has not seen the movie of The Hours. I knew this was a book that was in part about the writing of Mrs. Dalloway, and that it was about 3 women from different eras. But, I didn’t know I would be grappling with their moments of deep depression, and I had absolutely no idea I would be back in New York in the late 90s looking again into the heart of the AIDS epidemic. I had to take a very deep breath when I found myself walking the streets of my old neighborhood and watching the planning of a party for an author in the waning days of a battle with AIDS. I haven’t been back exactly there in awhile.

My review of this book reflects all this. I’m a little tearful as I type. I really can’t know how this book would feel to someone who doesn’t have these points of emotional connection. You will have to let me know. In the meantime, I am taking a few moments to savor the memories of the men who graced my life in those days, whose gifts to me are greater than they will ever know.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham‘s Pulitzer Prize winning homage toVirginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway, the reader travels between single days in the lives of three women. The first is Virginia Woolf herself, convalescing at a country estate to rest from the stresses of London and beginning to craft Mrs. Dalloway. The second is Clarissa Vaughn, humorously called Mrs. Dalloway by her best friend and former lover Richard who is now dying of AIDS and for whom she is planning a party that evening. The third is Laura Brown, a housewife and mother in the suburban LA of the 1950s.

Cunningham explores the wonder that each woman feels at some moments of her day, but also the emptiness and desperation that can, with equal or greater power, eclipse other moments, leaving her feeling profoundly insecure and disconnected from the living of her own life. The least prone to the experiences of emptiness and insecurity is Clarissa, who is now in an 18-year lesbian partnership and mother of a grown daughter. This is not coincidental, both Virginia and Laura are enlivened by a same-sex kiss, the implications of which can not be as easily and fully explored in the social environments of their times as they can be by Clarissa. Clarissa’s freedom to explore her world more fully, to love deeply both the men and women in her life in ways that are honest, seems to be a piece that Cunningham sees as crucial to feeling at home in the world.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway prior to reading this novel is crucial to truly appreciating what Cunningham achieves here. Without it, the book is a meditation on identity, life, and love, with a skillful interweaving of multiple plotlines. Knowing Mrs. Dalloway, a reader is able to savor the echoes of Woolf’s style and the small details of plot which are captured and reworked by Cunningham, particularly in the thread which follows Clarissa’s day.

This novel is also one of a small group of works that expertly captures a particular moment in time at the end of the 1990s in the American gay community. Clarissa’s reflections on the effect of the early AIDS epidemic, and the subsequent changes wrought by the discovery of protease inhibitors, on the lives and relationships within the gay community at that time are exactly on target. This makes up a relatively small part of the novel, and yet the particular questions about life, sanity, and the nature of relationships that the changes in the epidemic cast in stark relief in those days are exactly the questions that form the center of the novel.

This is a complex and skillfully crafted work. Read Mrs. Dalloway first, so that you can truly appreciate it. 4.5 stars.