Category Archives: John Le Carre

Tried and True

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I’ve been so busy reading that I haven’t made time to write in quite a while.  I have been keeping a list of what I’m reading, and the books kind of sort themselves into categories.  First one is the Tried and True, all books that I own by some of my favorite authors.

In my last post, I had just started reading Fatherland, by Robert Harris.  I read this book years ago, and the only thing I really remembered about it was the setting in a post World War II world where the Nazis didn’t lose.  I had a vague idea that the story was a murder investigation by a homicide detective in occupied Britain, but the murders and investigation happen in Germany.  I thought Harris did a great job of establishing the historical base of real people and events in Nazi Germany, then extrapolating forward to 1964, just before Hitler’s birthday celebration and a state visit by the U.S. president.  Harris’ hypothetical Berlin is a plausible setting for a standard issue maverick homicide detective with ex-wife issues who gets a lot more interesting as he stubbornly persists when a murder investigation takes him deep into the worst of past and present Nazi evildoing.  Robert Harris is a true favorite of mine; I wish he had written more books.

I have never been that interested in John Le Carre’s post Cold War books; I have several that I had bought but never read.  Our Game, written in 1995,  is one of the first, about a British intelligence cold warrior put out to pasture when his experience is no longer considered useful.  I found the storyline about the former agent and his gorgeous much younger girlfriend tedious, but then the girlfriend runs away with another former agent whose unquenchable idealism and adrenaline addiction take the story into the Chechnyan separatists’ fight against the Russians, and the history of their struggle is tragic and still timely.  I finished this book not long before the Boston Marathon bombings, and the way the information about the bombers and their family’s background in Chechnya and Dagestan meshed with the grim details in Our Game was eery. 

I read Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, and trusty Dorothy Gilman did a believable job with the cultural and political atmosphere of this good story set in the imaginary African country of Ubangiba.  Unfortunately, this is the last Mrs. Pollifax book and there will be no more.  Good thing I enjoy rereading books from this series.

My Deborah Knott series reread book was Killer Market, set in the furniture showrooms in High Point, North Carolina.  I haven’t been to High Point, but we’ve visited the huge furniture mall in Hickory NC; bought furniture there too.  Margaret Maron is good at researching the details for her books, and even better at folding them smoothly into the plot.  Love this series, am waiting impatiently for the next book.

I always need a collection of short stories on hand as a break or a stopgap.  The most recent ones I’ve read are by longtime favorites Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse.  Christie’s Thirteen Problems (Miss Marple) and Labors of Hercules (Hercule Poirot).   were packed away in boxes for several years, so it was good to see them again.  I have several Christie short story books, but need to do research to see if there are any more of hers out there.  My current ‘need to read’ book is Meet Mr. Mulliner, by P.G. Wodehouse.  No Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in these short stories, but Mr. Mulliner and his many relations are classic in their own right. 

I have to admit that even I can reread books too many times:  I just about have the short story collections on my shelves committed to memory.  So I’ve started reading my Calvin and Hobbes books again, still incredibly good.  

 

Long Hot Summer

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I thought that I would read more books and post more blog entries as I stayed housebound during Charleston’s hot and sticky summer, but it didn’t turn out that way.  A lot of this dereliction was caused by a Kindle game called Every Word, an addictive scrambled word game that the friendly Amazon people give Kindle owners for free.  A big time-suck, but so much fun.  I did get some reading in, though.

New (to me) books

I finished the second half of Midnight Rising (my book), an exciting and sad account of John Brown’s inexplicably nutty attack on Harpers Ferry.  Tony Horwitz finds heroism and cruelty on all sides of the attack and during the subsequent trial and execution of Brown and his captured men.  The story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry is familiar to me, but Horwitz makes a particulary detailed and compelling case that Brown’s actions and their consequences were pivotal in the run-up to the Civil War.  There is a long period between publication of each of Horwitz’s books, but they are always worth the wait.

I read half of The Potter’s House, by Rosie Thomas (library book), then flipped through to see how it turned out. Slow, boring, silly.  I liked Thomas’ Kashmir Shawl, so this was a disappointment.  I’m glad I didn’t spend any of my money on this thing.

Same thing with False Mermaid, by Erin Hart (library book).  This is Hart’s third book about a pathologist named Nora Gavin.  I’m a bit tired of pathologists in mystery series, but I really liked the first book in this series, Haunted Ground (Kindle book), especially the setting in Ireland and the details about ancient Irish history.  I thought the story about the years-back murder of Nora’s sister, heavily referenced in the first book, would be compelling, but it felt kind of flat.  Glad the library had it and I didn’t have to buy it.  I still want to read the second book, Lake of Sorrows, because Hart can be that good. 

I also read two books (library books) that aren’t just new, but by a new author:  Alan Furst.  I read about Furst in an article about a new British mini-series starring the former, fabulous Doctor Who, David Tennant.  The series is called The Spies of Warsaw, from the book of the same name by Alan Furst, “master of the historical spy novel”, according to Amazon.  So I added Alan Furst to my library list, and the library had two of his books. The World at Night is set in Paris just before and during the first part of the German occupation, and Dark Voyage is set on a Dutch tramp steamer in May and June 1941.  In a nutshell, The World at Night is about a French guy who has sex with different women and one fairly simple spy mission.  Boring both as a spy story and a love story.  Dark Voyage was a lot better with more interesting characters, and I liked the stories about the ship’s clandestine work for the British in the Mediterranean and the Baltic.  Still, Furst is a library and maybe used book store author for now.  On the other hand, I can hardly wait until January to see David Tennant in the new series.

Old Favorites

 I picked Archangel, by Robert Harris, off one of my shelves, read every word and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I read it years ago, but remembered hardly anything about it so it was almost like a new book.  Great characters and a really good story, based on events that started with the death of Stalin, and continue in post-USSR Russia.  Reading one of Harris’ novels is always a treat, but unfortunately he hasn’t written very many of them.

 I thought I would be reading a new book when I picked John LeCarre’s The Secret Pilgrim from another shelf, but realized fairly soon that I’d read it before.  I’ve bought several of LeCarre’s post-Cold War novels, but never really got into them.  I thought The Secret Pilgrim was one of those, but it consists mainly of an old spy named Ned reminiscing about (cold) war stories while George Smiley talks to a class of new spies.  The book was written in 1990, just after the break up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and John LeCarre, through George Smiley and Ned, has some prescient things to say about how the world would change after the victory of the West and capitalism. 

I then read a book, Pray for a Brave Heart (my book), by another great espionage author, who has a different perspective on the Cold War than LeCarre.  British author Helen MacInnes wrote Above Suspicion, one of my favorite spy novels, just before World War 2, followed by a couple more books set in occupied Europe.  MacInnes and her husband moved to the US after the war, and, after two lackluster novels, she found her niche in writing bestselling books about innocent Americans caught up in the Cold War struggle against Communism.  MacInnes tends to be earnest in these books, and seems to have lost her British sense of irony after she came to the US, but she is a fantastic storyteller and idealistic without being dogmatic.  Starting with Pray for a Brave Heart in 1955, she wrote six superb espionage novels set in various interesting European locations, good reads every one.  After 1968, I find the quality of her books a little more hit and miss, but even at less than her best, her books are very good.  Most of Pray for a Brave Heart is set in Zurich and a small mountain town not far away, and I enjoyed the descriptions of these places and how they were used in the plot.  The central plot concerns smuggling notable East Europeans out from behind the Iron Curtain, very current affairs for 1955, and still exciting to read about.  I was pleased to see that this book, as well as Above Suspicion, will be available in new editions in early 2013.  Nice to see this author getting attention again. 

Instead of reading the good non-fiction book I bought about the Indian Mutiny, I reread Flashman and the Great Game (my book), in which Flashman is caught in besieged Cawnpore and Lucknow and sees and experiences conditions similar to those in The Siege of Krishnapur.  As usual, he has many other adventures involving real historical people, he fornicates freely, extricates himself from deadly situations by the skin of his teeth, and n-words every non-European he comes across.  Love Flashman, get tired of some of the things he says.  While I was reading Great Game, I was also reading Midnight Rising.  After I finished them, I thought I’d read Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which is also about John Brown and Harpers Ferry, again.  But too much Flashman in a row is not a good thing, I put the book back and will take a Flashman break for a while.

I enjoyed rereading Sarah Caudwell’s Thus was Adonis Murdered so much, that I started her The Sirens Sang of Murder, and again it was a problem of reading two books by a talented but very stylized author in a row.  The witty young lawyers and their clever bantering lose too much of their charm when taken in too much quantity, so Caudwell needs to also be put aside for a while.

 

Old and New

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I haven’t been reading very much:  sewing cushions for my rattan chairs, gardening, planning a couple of social activities, Zumba and dithering over which pictures to put where have been taking up most of my time.  My latest project is sewing a blouse, which is not going to turn out very well but is good practice for future sewing projects.

For preparing, planting and caring for our front flower bed and container plants, The Southern Living Garden Book (my book) is a detailed, helpful reference.  I bought this book almost ten years ago, the first time we lived in Charleston, and I’m glad I kept it all these years.

I finished Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the end of the book is so perfect in an ambiguous sort of way that I got all cross again thinking about the butchered ending of this year’s movie.   I am tempted to start (re)reading The Honourable Schoolboy (my book, a UK edition), the next book in the Smiley/Karla trilogy, but I’m thinking I should try to read more books that are new to me.  After Tinker, Tailor, I re-read Enigma, by Robert Harris (my book).  This is a thriller about the British cryptologists at Bletchley Park who broke the German Enigma machine’s codes during World War 2.  Robert Harris is a terrific writer, so the book is much more gripping than it sounds.  Then I started The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (my book), another re-read.  I read this book not long after it was published in the late Eighties, and I remembered how much I liked it but not much of the novel’s details.  About halfway through, it is a wonderful story about Macon Leary, a stuffy isolated man who is mourning the murder of his son and subsequent breakup of his marriage, while trying to deal with his strange family, strange job and bad-tempered corgi Edward.  There is a nutty dog trainer named Muriel who helped Macon with Edward for a while, but, at this point in the novel, she has been banished for bad behavior of her own.  I’m enjoying the book, but it seems dated.  It’s strange to read what is essentially a contemporary popular novel without cell phones and the Internet.  This is when I started thinking that I should read more books that are not only new to me, but new in the sense of recently written.  I’m still going to finish Tourist, because it is a good book and Macon is a well-written character in spite of having no cell phone.

I have another book going which is (yes!) both new and by extension new to me:  The Bollywood Breakup Agency, by Naina Gupta.  I found this $0.99 Kindle book on Amazon yesterday while I was looking for another book and bought it through the magic of 1-click.  Amazon reviewers described it as a chick-lit book about a modern Indian girl trying to thwart her parents’ efforts to make an arranged marriage for her.  I’m about 5% into the book, just getting to the part of the story that will explain the title of the book, and so far it’s a light entertaining read.  The heroine is spoiled but cute, and her family life in the UK with her traditional family and Indian soap operas is interesting.  I think I’ll get my $0.99 worth out of this one. 

I did read and finish another book that was new to me:  The Man with a Load of Mischief, by Martha Grimes.  I bought this book after I read a positive review of Martha Grimes’ latest book in her Richard Jury mystery series.  I hadn’t read any books in this series, and decided to start with the first one, The Man with a Load of Mischief.  I found it very slow, with a lot of intricate detail about the detective, his eventual sidekick and all the murder suspects.  The motive for the murder was a very good twist, but the actual resolution of the mystery was bland.  I don’t plan to buy more of these, although I might try another one if I can find the series at the library.

In between these books, I read the anthology Malice Domestic 9, edited by Joan Hess (my book).  I thought all the stories were good and pleasant reading.  Not all the anthologies in this series are equally strong, but this is one of the better ones.  I also dipped into mysteries by one of my favorite need-to-read authors, Dick Francis.  I own a stack of his horse-racing mysteries, and I still get fun out of dipping into some of my favorites to take a break from books that need my full attention.  Dick Francis was a celebrated steeplechase jockey, so the racing details in the books are accurate and exciting, but it seems that his famous name and knowledge of racing are his main contributions to the books, with most of the writing actually done by his wife Mary, then by one of their sons after Mary’s death.  The family that wrote together made a lot of money and entertained a lot of people with the books, and it is good that Mary is getting some recognition now for her writing skill. 

Now before I pick up Robert Harris’ Fatherland to re-read it, I need to get to the library with my long booklist and find something new to read!