Trip to lending library: accomplished
Feb. 7th, 2012 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaFound my membership card and everything! This is a feat, okay. And went to the bank and paid all the bills and stuff, because it has thawed again and I can get around in Crocs. Took out the last Lymond book so I can finally finish it, A Moveable Feast for sororial unit because she wanted early 20th century and Hemingway and AMF is the only Hemingway I marked down as 100% BS-free (read it a decade ago and retain no content, only the feeling of the thing as per a lovely dream). And a bunch of Le Carrés, so I don't end up buying them. XD; No net savings were had because I then went to Bureau en Gros and blew $100 mysteriously on office supplies. When I was 15 I wanted nothing more out of adulthood than the ability to splurge on multi-coloured gel pens and silver bristol board whenever I felt like it, I suppose.
The two Le Carrés I had read before TTSS were The Little Drummer Girl, which I thought was pretty good but depressing, and The Tailor of Panama, which I loved. (This was undergrad, if not high school, since I know I read them a while before the movie of the latter came out.) This time I am starting at the top with FIRST PUBLISHED SMILEY NOVEL Call for the Dead, which is perfectly competent but very "first 100,000 words are for practice" compared to the later books. XD; In fact in a lot of ways it feels like a dry run for TTSS. The plot is good, but Le Carré seems to have struggled to flesh it out beyond 100 pages, and to integrate those vivid character sketches he's natively good at; you feel the bumps at the seams, and every piece of key data is repeated three times. I didn't say "flesh out the outline," because I don't think he had an outline - by current evidence dude is a NOSE-FOLLOWER by nature, just a master one, like Urasawa Naoki. In fact this rather read like Urasawa.
* All the core characters are there, which I didn't expect at all; the core situation is exactly the same (Smiley is forced out of his job and pining after Ann who has left him, Guillam acts as his proxy in MI6 when the investigation starts). Sidney Lumet filmed it in '66 and I note with hilarity that when he came to write TTSS, Le Carré outright stole that script's solution for integrating the Ann piece with the main action.
* The other funny thing is that this isn't a spy novel; it's a detective procedural. You get the feeling Le Carré just... made his detective a spy because that was his own job, the same way a lawyer might have written a detective story that was a legal thriller. XD; (By his own account, dude had NO JOB EXPERIENCE except in intelligence and teaching prep school.)
* Some of the details in the TTSS movie actually come from this book, unless they're recurring: Mendel's beekeeping, Ann's unopened mail. The beekeeping, I think, is a straight-up Holmes homage on Le Carré's part, who was clearly borrowing from Holmes-Watson-Lestrade and Wimsey-Parker. There's a lot more Mendel in this, relatively speaking.
* More absent!Ann. It would be kind of awesome if she were NEVER around to see her husband being bad-ass. It dawned on me with horror while reading this that the thing about Ann is, SHE IS GENETICALLY RELATED TO BILL HAYDON. (Also, she was the "Anthea" of the dude who recruited Smiley into the Service.)
* Guillam is really funny, in that dry way that is all phrasing, which is not how he came across in TTSS at all.
The other thing is I watched TTSS-the-movie THREE TIMES over the weekend, because other ppl wanted to see it, only not at the same time. XD; It stood up to the treatment, mind you. I have some extra points to make now but I have to get going from work.
***
Have gone on to The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold. If the movie were going to be remade now they'd get Fassbender and Skarsgård in. Smiley lets Control use his place for assignations like a spy version of poor Jack Lemmon out of The Apartment (one is not told but assumes Ann is FOREVER MISSING). Incidentally, Smiley's home in the movie is all dark and burnished and has that trendy Sherlock-ian retro-busy pattern thing going on, but the 70s BBC TV series gives him a WHITE ON WHITE modernist living room, rolling. The china figurines are canon, but one suspects the giant painting of irises was not the dude's own first pick.
The two Le Carrés I had read before TTSS were The Little Drummer Girl, which I thought was pretty good but depressing, and The Tailor of Panama, which I loved. (This was undergrad, if not high school, since I know I read them a while before the movie of the latter came out.) This time I am starting at the top with FIRST PUBLISHED SMILEY NOVEL Call for the Dead, which is perfectly competent but very "first 100,000 words are for practice" compared to the later books. XD; In fact in a lot of ways it feels like a dry run for TTSS. The plot is good, but Le Carré seems to have struggled to flesh it out beyond 100 pages, and to integrate those vivid character sketches he's natively good at; you feel the bumps at the seams, and every piece of key data is repeated three times. I didn't say "flesh out the outline," because I don't think he had an outline - by current evidence dude is a NOSE-FOLLOWER by nature, just a master one, like Urasawa Naoki. In fact this rather read like Urasawa.
* All the core characters are there, which I didn't expect at all; the core situation is exactly the same (Smiley is forced out of his job and pining after Ann who has left him, Guillam acts as his proxy in MI6 when the investigation starts). Sidney Lumet filmed it in '66 and I note with hilarity that when he came to write TTSS, Le Carré outright stole that script's solution for integrating the Ann piece with the main action.
* The other funny thing is that this isn't a spy novel; it's a detective procedural. You get the feeling Le Carré just... made his detective a spy because that was his own job, the same way a lawyer might have written a detective story that was a legal thriller. XD; (By his own account, dude had NO JOB EXPERIENCE except in intelligence and teaching prep school.)
* Some of the details in the TTSS movie actually come from this book, unless they're recurring: Mendel's beekeeping, Ann's unopened mail. The beekeeping, I think, is a straight-up Holmes homage on Le Carré's part, who was clearly borrowing from Holmes-Watson-Lestrade and Wimsey-Parker. There's a lot more Mendel in this, relatively speaking.
* More absent!Ann. It would be kind of awesome if she were NEVER around to see her husband being bad-ass. It dawned on me with horror while reading this that the thing about Ann is, SHE IS GENETICALLY RELATED TO BILL HAYDON. (Also, she was the "Anthea" of the dude who recruited Smiley into the Service.)
* Guillam is really funny, in that dry way that is all phrasing, which is not how he came across in TTSS at all.
The other thing is I watched TTSS-the-movie THREE TIMES over the weekend, because other ppl wanted to see it, only not at the same time. XD; It stood up to the treatment, mind you. I have some extra points to make now but I have to get going from work.
***
Have gone on to The Spy Who Came In Out Of The Cold. If the movie were going to be remade now they'd get Fassbender and Skarsgård in. Smiley lets Control use his place for assignations like a spy version of poor Jack Lemmon out of The Apartment (one is not told but assumes Ann is FOREVER MISSING). Incidentally, Smiley's home in the movie is all dark and burnished and has that trendy Sherlock-ian retro-busy pattern thing going on, but the 70s BBC TV series gives him a WHITE ON WHITE modernist living room, rolling. The china figurines are canon, but one suspects the giant painting of irises was not the dude's own first pick.
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Date: 2015-08-29 05:39 am (UTC)I'm currently reading TTSS myself, after watching the film version (my brother and I had fun playing "Spot The Harry Potter Alumni" — Sirius, Dobby, Alberforth, Ollivander...) and the mini series. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I really have to commend the 2011 film on its tight script. I now realize that it tweaked a lot of stuff, compressed some characters together, and the climax where Gerald was caught went off very differently, but all in all it passed my "adaptation test" requirement that the screenplay must tell a coherent story in and of itself, without the "this big thing will make sense if you read the book(s)" bull$&/t. This July I visited Beijing to pick up a relative at the airport, but not before going through three of the major foreign bookstores over there, I found books that I wanted to own for a long time including Patrick Suskind's "Perfume", a defnitive edition of Anne Frank's "Diary of A Young Girl", and more importantly "Red Dragon" and "The Silence of the Lambs" *starry eyes* I also struck up a conversation with a Chinese lady and her three half-Caucasian children, I ended up chatting about HP with the daughter, she said that PoA was her favorite story among the seven, and I asked her if she could understand the story from the film version per se, and she said NO, and I did a "Prof. Flitwick in film!OotP" style fistpump. I've been trying to tell people for years that the film barrel can't hold much water if the story was the shortest stick. And now finally I had VALIDATION. I really learned a lot from what you've written about those books, and if John le Carré's books and their adaptations are continuously as good as TTSS, then I have some great reading/viewing to look forward to.
Oh, and before I go: there exists an audiobook for "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and it's read by Michael Jayston a.k.a. Peter Guillam from the BBC series. It serves as a very interesting experience.
(And I'm recommending "Perfume: The Story of A Murderer", both the book and the film version.)