Call for the Dead

I started listening to John le Carre with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (another book which I can thoroughly recommend) and i've become addicted to him. This, his first book, is a great read/listen and a much easier one than Tinker Tailor, albeit just as engrossing. I would highly recommend it.

Another John le Carré novel that I would recommend unreservedly. I have read other le Carré novels first that were far more epic in nature but enjoyed that this story started off in a far more subtle way gradually bring the characters we love into focus.

In some audio books I find I have to try to ignore the fact that the narrator only seems to be able to do one voice for a dozen different characters or uses a tone/accent that seems completely at odds with the story itself. In this version the narrator is in perfect keeping with the atmosphere of the book bringing the characters and story to life in a way which in my opinion is comparable with the BBC dramatizations.

As the first LeCarre I was a little trepidatious, fearing a weak first novel. But this was a cracker. Excellently read and with a sense of tone and atmosphere which drew me in to a nicely complex plot, not overdone or hard to follow but gripping and engaging.

The first George Smiley novel which is worth listening to for the back story alone. Set at the dawn of the cold war as the first east european intelligence networks are developing, it feels much more of a period piece; telephone exchanges, cockney car dealers and amateur theatre companies. However, in this early novel, we can John le Carres lift this spy story far above a penny thriller through his ability to paint psycological complexity and claustrophobic atmosphere.

This book provides aditional information about smileys charictor, introduces suporting charictors like Mendel and Guilum, and is a good story in it's own right, but a friend of mine who read as their first le Carre was left unsure what the fuss was about.