Two years ago I was in the bookstore searching for something to read and my eye alighted upon a whole row of John le Carré novels. I decided to give them a try, and since I tend to gorge when I read, I bought the first twelve of them right then and there.I read the first one, didn't think much of it, skipped to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, liked it but didn't love it---the ending was too melodramatic and stagey for me---and then read The Looking Glass War and was, from the opening scene, blown the f--- away. The use of coincidence for deepening crisis, the ineptitude of the players in the spy services, the desperation of the resulting mission, including the inadequacy of preparation---all of this had a maturity and kind of controlled insanity to it that appealed to me.I then hungrily devoured (and savored) A Small Town in Germany, which I still think is one of le Carré's best novels, with so many places where, as a writer, he impressed the hell out of me with his use of craft, while still delivering on an emotional level. By the time I hit A Small Town in Germany, I was having to re-read sections and take notes on all kinds of things he was doing stylistically, approaches to narrative and character, the way he doesn't usually let character movements be generic, not to mention the way he describes speech in interesting ways.If we were talking about a great boxer, we'd talk about all of the small things he does well. Like, that little half-step to the left after delivering a punch while turning his shoulder, or the almost imperceptible feint to the right that results in the opponent not just missing but leaving himself open for a counterpunch. Or the way he leans on his opponent while on the ropes to tire him out. Le Carré is that great boxer for me. I see all of the little things he does in his fiction and how that sets up the bigger things, and I'm in awe. So much appears so effortless, and yet it takes monumental effort and practice.After A Small Town in Germany, I got blissfully lost in the George Smiley novels and didn't come up for air for six months. Looking at some of those novels, there are fewer pages unmarked than marked. I took at least two years off of the learning curve of acquiring the kind of technique on display, just by reading and re-reading those novels.Then I came to A Perfect Spy and le Carré kicked my ass again, but in a different way. He found a way to merge the spy thriller and what in the literary mainstream would be called a detailed, complex, and intense portrait of a man from childhood to the present-day of the novel. It's riveting, moving stuff, and one of my favorite novels.Although not all of his recent output has hit those highs, le Carré continues to impress me and to motivate me. Now in his 80s, he's continuing to engage with the world as it currently exists---to dive into the moral ambiguity and controversy---not how it existed when he wrote his most iconic novels about the Cold War. Sometimes his work is on a smaller scale now, sometimes you can see the joins. But then you read something like the first sixty pages of his latest, Our Kind of Traitor, and your mouth drops open again. That first sixty pages is as adroit and skillful an opening to a novel as I've read in the last year.Anyway, I've posted the first of a few short pieces on the man's work on Omnivoracious, and as I post more I'll try to also post here, if I have time. I'd like to mirror the posts from a reader's perspective on Omnivoracious with ones from the writer's perspective on Ecstatic Days.
