George Smiley Series #1

Call for the Dead was John Le Carré’s first novel, and it introduces his best-known character, George Smiley. Smiley is an intelligence officer for British Intelligence whose first career assignment was a posting in Germany as an undercover recruiter. By 1967 when Call for the Dead was adapted for film Le Carré had already published three of what would eventually be nine novels in this series. However, due to a rights issue the character, played by James Mason, was renamed, as was the title for the film: The Deadly Affair. Penguin reprinted the novel in 1967 under this name to tie in with the film. The film was generally faithful to the novel; however, Smiley’s unfaithful wife is more fully integrated into the story. Instead of running off with a playboy Cuban racing car driver, Ann becomes involved with the man who will eventually be Smiley’s target in the case. It’s the sort of neat treatment Hollywood gives a story, although Le Carré, himself, co-wrote the screenplay. Yet the change of title and the affair gives the story a different focus. The real female protagonist in the story should be Elsa Fennan, whose experiences as a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp, and her observations to Smiley about his job and the world of politics, provide some of the most insightful and interesting moments of the novel. In comparison, Charles Dobbs’ marital troubles (that’s the name given the Smiley character played by Mason in the film) seem somewhat tawdry and pathetic.

Le Carré spends the first chapter of the novel establishing Smiley’s background, outlining his unexpected marriage to Lady Ann Secomb, his early career and then the circumstances surrounding the failure of Smiley’s marriage. What he is really doing is establishing character, not plot, which is what the film makes of the relationship. That’s really the point of introducing an estranged wife at this stage. When Ann leaves, Smiley tries to rid himself of everything that reminds him of her. In the opening chapter we are told “he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty.” Later, Ann contacts Smiley about getting back together, but we see that Smiley has been burned by the relationship. His mind can barely focus on what she wants. Instead, his thoughts turn from her to the problems of his case. Smiley is a rational man who suppresses his feelings. He has not opposed his wife’s lover and he allows Ann to take whatever she wants from the marriage. We understand he is not a man of grand gestures or masculine rage.

And that is generally the style of Le Carré’s writing, too. Le Carré’s spy novels are rarely driven by physical action, although Smiley faces life-threatening danger in this story and is badly injured twice. Smiley is not a James Bond (even though Fleming’s influence would have been established, since he was publishing his ninth James Bond novel, Thunderball, the year that Call for the Dead was published). In Le Carré’s novels spy craft is secretive and cautious. When he knows he may be about to face a dangerous situation, Smiley briefly considers taking a pistol with him but knows he won’t use it. Smiley is not a braggadocios womaniser, nor is he compelled to violence. Instead, he is “short, fat, and of a quiet disposition”; a thoughtful, feeling man who is insightful and is capable of empathising with his subjects.

Samuel Fennan, an agent Smiley has interviewed the previous day commits suicide. He has been denounced in an anonymous letter as a double agent. However, Smiley’s investigation and his interview with Fennan produce no evidence that should concern British Intelligence, and Smiley has reassured Fennan during the interview that he will be cleared. As a result of Fennan’s death, Smiley comes under scrutiny and is asked to investigate further. Fennan’s wife, Elsa, seems emotionally contained and is willing to speak with Smiley when he visits. There is little to raise suspicion during the interview, except that a phone call to the Fennan household – Smiley thinks it is for him and so answers it – turns out to be a wake-up call booked by Fennan for 8:30 that morning. Fennan has been found dead, apparently shot by his own hand, with a typewritten suicide note beside him and has left a cup of cocoa he had prepared, undrunk, after booking a wake-up call. Later, Smiley will discover that Fennan had sent him a note asking for another meeting the following day: the day he is found dead. Smiley is increasingly convinced that Fennan has been murdered.

The novel is short – only 157 pages in my edition – so there is little opportunity to develop a complex plot. This includes the seventeenth chapter which is mostly a report written by Smiley that is largely unnecessary exposition further clarifying the case, most of which has already been clarified. The denouement is obvious – I anticipated it somewhat early – although the climactic scenes are well executed. Smiley knows the operational tricks of his antagonist, Dieter Frey, since Frey worked for Smiley in Germany, and uses them to his advantage. He sets up a fateful meeting between Frey and Elsa during a theatre production of Edward II. The scene is reminiscent of the play scene in Hamlet. They will use the circumstances in the theatre to encourage their suspect to incriminate himself. The scene is genuinely tense, as is the action that follows.

This novel is not as polished or as sophisticated as later Le Carré works, but it is still an enjoyable read, and given its length, it is hardly a burden. But it is evident, even here, that this is the work of a skilled writer who wants his audience to think about human foibles and the political and social constructs by which we operate. It is impossible to get past the fact that Elsa Fennan is a Jew who has survived the concentration camps, and that the Cold War and Germany’s subsequent revitalisation as a European power is troubling. From our current perspective it may be easy to dismiss these concerns, but written at the beginning of the 1960s, Call for the Dead presents the concern of a resurgent Germany as a creditable source of anxiety.

Given its historical context, it is not surprising that Call for the Dead is mildly patriotic, too. Smiley’s reserved rationalism is not just a personal trait, but it represents a quality of civilisation, of which Britain is exemplary in his mind:

… Smiley was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of England. He fed hungrily on memories of Oxford: its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgments.

Against this, Smiley measures the strident nationalism of Germany before the war:

… he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers.

German society had become ideologically driven. Even in his own university where his course on German literature had been amended, students had gathered to burn books, many by Germany’s greatest writers. The impression, whatever weaknesses this first novel may bear, is of a writer who understands implicitly the concatenation of historical context, character and the philosophical heart of the novel. Smiley’s investigation of Elsa Fennan and her husband is not compelling because it is a complex case or it provides thrills for the reader, or even because it has some mild nationalistic overtones, but because it works on a human level. Smiley is a deeply personal man, and he instinctively recoils against the low common denomination of twentieth century culture that he understands to be dehumanising:

He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century … the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass? When had mass philosophies ever bought benefit or wisdom.

We are told that “Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism.”

It is an attitude that is implicitly echoed by Elsa Fennan. Having survived the concentration camps, Elsa has undergone a physical change. Smiley observes, “the body had been broken with hunger so that it was frail and ugly, like the carcass of a dying bird.” The realities of ideological fanaticism are exemplified in Elsa’s body. It represents the intersection between the individual and the mass consciousness created by ideological belief: initially turned against books and ideas, it in turn provides a permission structure to act cruelly against people. She tells Smiley,

The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims.

The problem with ideologies and the construct of a State upon which they are predicated is that ideas forget the reality of people and their suffering: that they allow degradation and persecution at a remove beyond personal accountability:

The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? To dream in doctrines – how tidy!

For Elsa, Smiley represents the State: impersonal; looking to tidy things up. But we understand that the disconnect between State and humanity is exemplified by the problem of Nazi Germany that has already repelled Smiley. But Elsa is right. It is a problem that each individual must face or risk moral corruption. Dieter Fray becomes comfortable with the idea that people need to suffer or die to protect his cause; a cause which is ostensibly altruistic, otherwise. For Smiley, who has shut away his personal feelings and become his job, the proof of his humanity lies in the horror he feels at the death of another who would otherwise have killed him. But the overall effect is of moral ambiguity. There is a sense that any ideology is morally suspect and just as capable of corruption. The nationalistic tones that are expressed early in the novel are tempered by Smiley’s own experience as an intelligence officer: the idea that personal temperament may be all that morally separates any one set of beliefs from another.

Call for the Dead is ostensibly a police procedural but the subject of spies and national intelligence gives it a broader historical context that a police procedural would otherwise not have attained, and it allows for a deeper meditation on the problem of ideas that supplant our humanity. It is not a perfect first novel, but it is certainly very interesting.

The George Smiley Series