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Yet more Le Carré update
Feb. 8th, 2012 02:45 pm(These are short books, okay.)
The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold: at some point I started to maintain a mental reading list in my head called "The Steve Rogers Book Club." As in: read, ponder, discuss. It accretes upon itself like a character DJ mix, but is otherwise unrelated in function. The guiding principle is that some things you haven't lived through are just better explained via Contemporary Art, particularly since collective memory is selective and 20/20 hindsight generally dodgy. Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses" is on the list, and now this is too. In-movie-verse, I imagine Bruce Banner is the one who came up with it; that feels instinctively right. It definitely wouldn't be SHIELD proper. XD;
Le Carré was so depressed at this point that when the Berlin Wall went up he subconsciously took it as the outward symbol of ALL HIS BITTERNESS, so it's just as well it became a runaway best-seller and he finally got to quit his day job. XD;; You can tell it was written d'un trait, in one massive word dump - very few fucks given re: consistency issues like referring to characters by given versus last names, or even tense concordance. It's an overgrown short story, and a Borges short story at that. Timeline-wise, it's a direct sequel to Call for the Dead and retrospectively sets up a lot of the Smiley-verse (even though I still have no idea how dude ends up #2 in the Circus?!?), but reads like the kind of one-off fluke after which the author disappears to Tahiti and is never heard from again in the world of letters.
Other than that, I have to hand it to the guy: he tries really hard to stay neutral and not display utter contempt for Communist Party members in the West. It still comes out reading like Ayn Rand, though. XD (In fact I wonder if some part of this is my perception.)
The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold: at some point I started to maintain a mental reading list in my head called "The Steve Rogers Book Club." As in: read, ponder, discuss. It accretes upon itself like a character DJ mix, but is otherwise unrelated in function. The guiding principle is that some things you haven't lived through are just better explained via Contemporary Art, particularly since collective memory is selective and 20/20 hindsight generally dodgy. Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses" is on the list, and now this is too. In-movie-verse, I imagine Bruce Banner is the one who came up with it; that feels instinctively right. It definitely wouldn't be SHIELD proper. XD;
Le Carré was so depressed at this point that when the Berlin Wall went up he subconsciously took it as the outward symbol of ALL HIS BITTERNESS, so it's just as well it became a runaway best-seller and he finally got to quit his day job. XD;; You can tell it was written d'un trait, in one massive word dump - very few fucks given re: consistency issues like referring to characters by given versus last names, or even tense concordance. It's an overgrown short story, and a Borges short story at that. Timeline-wise, it's a direct sequel to Call for the Dead and retrospectively sets up a lot of the Smiley-verse (even though I still have no idea how dude ends up #2 in the Circus?!?), but reads like the kind of one-off fluke after which the author disappears to Tahiti and is never heard from again in the world of letters.
Other than that, I have to hand it to the guy: he tries really hard to stay neutral and not display utter contempt for Communist Party members in the West. It still comes out reading like Ayn Rand, though. XD (In fact I wonder if some part of this is my perception.)
