Tag: John le Carre

“It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.”

Second Le Carre book, after “Call for the Dead”. This one is a disappointment, because it’s not a spy novel at all. Just quite a regular mystery novel with Smiley as the protagonist. But other than a reference to a middle-class woman as “she was red brick” and a description of the local chief of police in his office as a “water rat on a raft, his hair all wet”, there isn’t much I could get out of it.

Finished listening to Call for the Dead. This is the first Le Carre novel, and for a first one, it’s written pretty well. It was obviously influenced by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg couple.
Listening to it after “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is interesting, because you can see how Mundt was retrofitted to be a double agent later on. There’s very little wiggle room for that in the original novel.
Also interesting that Dieter, Smiley’s pupil that switched to work for East Germany after the war, is confirmed dead by the end of the novel. I’d thought author would leave it hanging.

Started listening and quickly understood that it’s a radionovel, or radiodrama, or whatever it’s called when instead of a book simply read to you, you have different actors, but just the dialogues.
When I switched to a proper audio book I quickly noticed that those that worked on dramatising it, had quite a few liberties with the original book. They added themes, such as the circus theme. In the original book, the Circus is what’s MI6 headquarters is called. But in the drama, Alec is also making a joke about “traveling with a circus and doing a bear act” or something like that, which refers to him spying on the Russians in East Berlin. Or the starting scene, when I spy tries to cross a checkpoint between East and West Berlin. In the drama, there’s a CIA agent that watches it through binoculars and describes everything to Alec. In the book, the CIA agent went to sleep, and Alec even makes a joke about how soft they are.

‘She comes from an old family with a strong political tradition. With time it’s rather spread.’
‘The tradition?’ – Lacon loved to nail an ambiguity.
‘The family.’

Если к Little Drummer Girl у меня почти не было нареканий, то тут сразу “не верю”. Ну не станет русская шпионка писать дневник, и все тут.