The first thing a book reviewer
should tell you is what connects the books he favors. Your fertile mind already knows why a
reviewer’s preferences are relevant. But
wordy bastard that I am, I’m going to tell you anyway.
Books that are page-turners
for one reader are slogs in ankle deep mud for another. Why is that?
As Louise Rosenblatt famously
wrote, there are three points of view involved in reading a book: what the writer intended to write, what he
actually wrote, and what the reader’s experiences bring to the book.
Let’s say an automotive
enthusiast thinks he’s writing a thriller, but what really comes out is a plot
strung together with fists full of engineering details. The Tom Clancy of Detroit.
Along comes a reader who’s an
engineer. He’s enthralled! Along comes yours truly, who knows how to
change oil, put gas in the tank, and on rare occasions (thank goodness) knows
how to use a jack and a spare tire.
Which one of us is this book going to thrill?
So what kind of reader is
this reviewer? I like character driven
plots. And by that, I don’t mean angst
upon angst, but rather main characters who embrace the human element and are
strong and true to themselves. Don’t
give me a detective that is suddenly afraid to pull the trigger, or a terrified
wife who cannot overcome her fears and rise to the occasion. Don’t bore me with twenty pages of divorce
and finding solace in a bottle.
How about the plot? I demand twists, turns, and even a few
digressions, but not to the detriment of this reader’s attention span.
At the top of my list is
prose that flows as smoothly as water over glass, without pretentiousness or
contrivances.
Now that you know. let’s
breeze off into the world of espionage, 1950’s style, with John le Carré’s
first novel, Call for the Dead,
where we’ll meet Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley.
“When Lady Ann Sercomb
married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her
astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary…Short, fat, and of a
quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes,
which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”
This is our hero, our main character
in an espionage novel??? Unlike James
Bond, who roams the globe in fast cars, with the fast women, while winning vast
sums in casinos, and staying in the world’s grand hotels, George Smiley lives
in an unremarkable apartment in London.
In the war he distinguished himself with hard work and undeniable results. But, he just didn’t fit the model of a
leader, so while he was kept on after the war, he remained ordinary and a bit
of a necessary pain for the bureaucrats in charge.
But, most of all, George Smiley
has a mind that processes bits and pieces that don’t quite fit. He also has the constitution of a bulldog
whose teeth never loose their grip, no matter how many other minds distract his
path of inquiry.
Call for the Dead begins with a suicide.
Immediately Smiley is under the gun.
He interviewed the man only yesterday.
Did the interview go badly? Was
it something Smiley said that caused an unintended event?
Smiley seems to have been
affected only by the tragedy that produced a death and a widow, not by the
snide inquiries into his own behavior. Something
bothers him and it’s not the bureaucratic heat.
For the next 150 pages the
book would not release me from it’s thought provoking pages. When I wasn’t reading, I was thinking.
It’s no wonder the Sunday
Telegram glowed with enthusiasm: “Intelligent,
thrilling, surprising…makes most cloak and dagger stuff taste of cardboard.”
George Smiley flows off the
page, just as real as if we were sitting with him in some innocuous parlor,
sipping tea from cracked cups. And the
plot, even with the unexpected twists and turns, never waivers.
Toss away thoughts of James
Bond’s world, singlehandedly stopping madmen from producing nuclear weapons and
controlling the planet. Instead, pick a
quiet time, pour yourself a whiskey with soda, settle into an easy chair, and
blissfully wander into George Smiley’s world of quiet, deliberate espionage.
But, don’t be lulled, it’s a thriller.
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