Celebrating the Mundane

John Le Carre’s Call for the Dead is the origin story of George Smiley. Le Carre is a pen name for David Cornwell, who was a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service. Coincidentally, George Smiley is a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service.

Le Carre became famous writing spy novels, the best of which feature George Smiley and are canonical in the genre. (He also write some truly awful novels; a rather hit or miss author.) Smiley himself is memorable; in the movies he gets played by Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, which is not bad at all.

Call for the Dead is not only the first Smiley novel, it is the first novel Le Carre wrote. It shows. Later in life, Le Carre’s novels tended toward becoming overly lengthy endurance tests for the reader. This first novel is short and crisp.

The obvious comparison for George Smiley is James Bond. Bond had been around for about 8 years before Smiley. Bond was flashy, daring and saved the world over and over. A very popular hero; the first movie came out a year after Call of the Dead. In the movies, Bond was, of course, played by Sean Connery.

The difference between Connery and Guinness tells you a lot about the difference between Bond and Smiley. Bond is handsome and amazing and gets the gorgeous girl. Smiley is physically unattractive, boring, and…is married to a wealthy gorgeous woman! Alas, the beautiful woman runs off after two years of marriage for a hotter, younger man.

Smiley is, in other words, nothing like James Bond. He is so bland that he actually makes a good spy; nobody ever suspects the really boring guy is a spy. He just plods along through life, shocked that a beautiful woman married him, not surprised that she left him. He is smart and puzzles things out in a very plodding way.

His superiors don’t listen to him, so he quits his job as a spy. But, he still keeps thinking about the case before him. No drama. Just the equivalent of steady police work. There is spy stuff in the story, but not the crazy gizmos of the James Bond movies. Just regular boring spy stuff. How to arrange a meeting. How to pass documents to another person. How the spy organizations are structured.

Call for the Dead achieves the rare feat of making spy work seem like a thoroughly non-exciting thing. Just another day at the office as a mid-level bureaucrat doing the same sorts of things mid-level bureaucrats do in any bureaucratic large organization. What makes George Smiley heroic? Well, nothing. He isn’t heroic at all. Just a guy plodding along doing his job.

Even the title of the book is a sign of how remarkably unexceptional everything in this novel is. Smiley is looking into an apparent suicide The phone rings in the house; it is from the service that arranges to call you at a set time, like an alarm clock. The call for the dead guy is the clue that tells Smiley something is off; why would a guy about to commit suicide set an alarm clock for the following morning? Well, he wouldn’t.

No call for the dead; no story. A boring spy just happens to be there when the phone rings for a boring reason and then he plods along and works out what just happened.

So, the novel now sounds perfectly dull. But it isn’t. Le Carre writes well; he story moves along at a nice clip, and you get to watch Smiley puzzling out the big picture and then figuring out how to catch all the culprits. This isn’t a s good as the great Smiley novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and The Spy Wo Came in from the Cold), but the great novels do have the same plodding pace.

Is there a lesson here? Is there anything that makes this book rise up above a decent way to spend an evening? Sure. Reading a decently crafted tale by an author who can write well is exactly the sort of small detail that actually makes up the bulk of our lives. Most of life is not exciting events worthy of a major motion picture starring Sean Connery. Most of life is just a nondescript person like you or me doing the sorts of things we all do. I read books and write about them. I read Call for the Dead and I am writing about it. You read what wrote. This is not a bad description of life.

Sometimes it is worth reminding ourselves that a life can be worth living, and a book can be worth reading, even if it is not accompanied by trumpets and fanfare.