Call For the Dead – John le Carre (George Smiley #1)
Read: Jan. 2nd 2024
Published: 1961
Country: England
First novel. More boilerplate mystery than later works but still has the same familiar questioning and exploration of geopolitical power dynamics. Smiley take quite a beating in this one.
Quotes:
- “But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.”
- “He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.”
- “The technique is based on the theory that the interviewer, loving no one as well as himself, will be attracted by his own image. You therefore assume the exact social, temperamental, political and intellectual colour of your inquisitor.” “Pompous toad. But intelligent lover.” “Silence. Sometimes this method founders against the idiocy or ill-disposition of the inquisitor. If so, become an armadillo.”
- “He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? Dieter cared nothing for human life: dreamed only of armies of faceless men bound by their lowest common denominators; he wanted to shape the world as if it were a tree, cutting off what did not fit the regular image; for this he fashioned blank, soulless automatons like Mundt. Mundt was faceless like Dieter’s army, a trained killer born of the finest killer breed.”
- “They had fought in a cloud, in the rising stream of the river, in a clearing in a timeless forest: they had met, two friends rejoined, and fought like beasts. Dieter had remembered and Smiley had not. They had come from different hemispheres of the night, from different worlds of thought and conduct. Dieter, mercurial, absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic, protective, had fought to prevent him. “Oh God,” said Smiley aloud, “who was then the gentleman…?”