“Breathtakingly ordinary”

The perennial London fog

Call for the Dead
by John Le Carré.
Penguin Books 1964 (1961).

What can be said about Le Carré’s first novel that hasn’t been said before, and better than anything I can offer? What can be added to an assessment of George Smiley which has already been discussed, expanded on, in fact more than adequately described by the author himself in the pages of this and subsequent Smiley novels?

The answer is, of course, nothing of material worth; so the best I can do is present my own reactions to this already six decades old spy thriller, based on my own memories of the early sixties and limited experience of this genre.

But one doesn’t need to be a veteran fan of espionage novels to appreciate the supreme achievement of the then debut novelist, namely the creation of a figure whom Smiley’s ex-wife characterised as breathtakingly ordinary, an oxymoron that is still so apposite and which goes to the heart of Smiley’s appeal as a fictional hero. For his nondescript outward appearance conceals no ordinary mind, proof of the adage that one should never judge a book by its cover.

The inciting incident for the action is only hinted at by the close of the first chapter, one with the prosaic title of ‘A Brief History of George Smiley’. We are given to understand that we are now in the first day or so of a New Year—probably 1960—when Smiley is informed of the suicide of Samuel Fennan, who worked in the Foreign Office and had been anonymously denounced as a former Communist. Smiley had informally interviewed him beforehand and advised no further action, but a suicide note calls Smiley’s integrity into question.

When, after interviewing his widow Elsa Fennan, Smiley feels a lack of support from a superior, he resigns from the Secret Service. But this doesn’t bring matters to a close, and Smiley is drawn into a game of cat and mouse with even his own life hanging in the balance, all because of a phone call to a dead man.

Smiley’s world in the early sixties is one I can recollect from my own childhood experience—black & white television, grey newsprint, streets the colour of gunmetal, swirling fog, smoke-filled rooms, with even lowering rainclouds reflecting monochrome urban lives. Though things are on the cusp of change—flower power, colour tv, growing affluence are all around the corner—the Cold War is now in full swing, satellite surveillance still in its infancy, and the cosy world of spying dons is yielding to a new breed of bureaucrats and office politics.

Smiley’s dogged and dangerous investigation takes him through the damp thoroughfares of the capital and the mean streets of its suburban hinterland; he is seldom able to take emotional comfort in his love of classic German texts and he still struggles with the absence of Lady Ann, his stunning society wife who has abandoned him for a Cuban racing driver. Luckily for him he has Peter Guillam from the Service and the soon-to-retire Inspector Mendel from Special Branch on his side when the going get hairy and a figure from his wartime past enters the frame.

When Call for the Dead was published it was intended to give a more realistic picture of the Secret Service, its modus operandi and its personnel than that given by Ian Fleming’s sensationalised agent James Bond and department. In this it was evidently successful as a string of novels, with or without George Smiley, soon emerged under David Cornwell’s nom de plume until his death in 2020. As a whodunit this debut novel wasn’t particularly unfathomable; and much more than the how and the why what makes Call for the Dead promising as literature is the combination of characterisation, historical context, and the clash of ideologies all being placed under the author’s microscopic scrutiny for our enlightenment as much as enjoyment.

Above all we invest willy-nilly in the unprepossessing Smiley, an unlikely hero portrayed as “a bullfrog in a sou’wester” and “without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty.” An imperfect and unflamboyant protagonist he may be, an unexpected surrogate Everyman, but those who value intelligence, intellectual curiosity and psychological acumen will see behind the façade Smiley both consciously and unconsciously adopts.

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I’ve previously reviewed the second Smiley novel A Murder of Quality and the last A Legacy of Spies.