Call for the Dead by John Le Carre Search Amazon for other books by or about John Le Carre. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

In his book Violence, Slavoj Zizek identified as one of the principal causes of violence or, at least, the method of avoiding it, the need to accept the presence of a neighbour. Neighbours are other people--they are different and it is an effort not to force them away. The ability of people to accept neighbours is, therefore, the source of urban living and much of culture while also representing a source of stress and potential rage. Perhaps this is why spies, once unmasked, are often treated with such contempt and hatred and the need to suppress their identity causes the agents themselves such anomie. The stranger in our midst is, after all, a staple of popular media and received much more attention in the Communist scare American society of the 1950s and 60s, which was the cause of so much of the science fiction of the Invasion of the Pod People style. The early series of the British spy programme Spooks, for example, took as one of its main theses the isolation and misery of the lone spy, together with the temptations that come the way of such agents.

Of course, British spy fiction on screen, stage and page always exists in the shadow of the great master of the genre, John Le Carre, whose expositions of the circus and its tradecraft have shaped the consciousness of generations of readers. The reissue of Le Carre's first novel, The Call of the Dead, is a very welcome addition to the author's work in print. This quite slim novel, written in 1961, brings the introduction of George Smiley, one of the great detective characters in fiction. Reading about Smiley's early professional life (i.e. in the service) in pre-war Germany, his marriage and the first infidelity by his cruel wife ("toad" she calls him while they are courting and "minx" he calls her) is like having the first fifty lines returned to the Waste Land--it explains so much of what was to come later which the reader, deprived of this introductory work, has had to eke out of the details of the lives of Smiley and his various colleagues. There is also the introduction of Peter Guillam, who plays such an important but self-effacing part in many subsequent books and is never again, as I recall, really described in physical terms--he becomes a sort of Secret Service butler, omnipresent and Jeeves-like in efficiency but not really looked at by any of the characters involved. In addition to this, there is also a satisfying plot about spies and their lives focusing on the aftermath of the Second World War and the choices facing Germans dissident to the Nazi regime when the Soviet forces arrived in the east.

John Le Carre is one of the greatest of our living novelists and his range of interests, wisdom and humanity far exceeds that which can normally be expected from literature confined to a single "genre." To read any of his books is to be transported into a different and very adult world. Recommended.