I've been watching Roberto Rossellini's The Age of the Medici this afternoon. Or about the middle two and a half hours of the four hour long 'mini-series'. I've been really enjoying it and surprisingly I haven't gotten too distracted watching it (this is something of a rarity for me in the past two years or so, I can probably using my fingers and toes all of the movies I've been able to make it through since the start of 2009). It's made me wonder though why the thought of watching movies leave me so blah lately. Partly, I think I might have overdosed on movies in my maniacal attempt to watch the entire Criterion Collection, when I would watch up to three movies a day and feel extremely anxious if anything was going to come between me and the times I designated as 'must watch more films' time. Instead I've traded in obsessive movie watching with abnormally large amounts of reading for embarrassingly abnormal amounts of reading, no movies, and a handful of tv shows that I half heartedly try to keep up with.On of the plus sides of almost never watching movies anymore is that the ones I do find myself actually watching probably are more impressive to me than they would be if I were watching a lot of films. Unlike many of my goodreads.com friends, I can't talk intelligently about movies, there are things I like and things I don't like and even though I have somewhat pretentious, or snobbish, or highbrow tastes I can do little to articulate why I like a movie. Part of it is that movies don't inspire my thoughts like books do, another is that I don't think I really get or like the principle language of film. The more literary directors, like Bergman I could probably talk about but it would be using the language of books to say what I like or how I think the film works. That is what I'm enjoying about The Age of the Medici the way that Rossellini is moving the story and ideas along not by action but by words. The film is visually interesting with the lavish depiction of Renaissance Florence, but the narrative moves like a cross between the party goers of James Joyce's "The Dead" and the espionage novels of John Le Carre.Le Carre writes the anthesis spy novel's as compared to someone like Robert Ludlum or what I imagine Ian Fleming's novels to be like. His hero in this trilogy of novels is George Smiley, a person who is the exact opposite of what the movie version of James Bond is. Smiley is a short fat man. He's unremarkable looking. He has a beautiful wife who is always openly sleeping with other men (she has at least 11 regulars she is sleeping with and a second tier group that she can turn to). When Smiley is at his best in working a case the description of him is bored looking and at times other characters aren't sure if Smiley is awake or asleep. With all of these not so appealing traits he is also one of the most effective caseworkers in The Circus (the British Intelligence or Spy business). There is some action that occurs in the Smiley books but it is almost always told in dialog. Rarely does the reader see the big events, rather they are presented them the same way that Smiley receives most of them through briefings, reports conversations and interrogations. Le Carre does a fantastic job at creating a lush espionage world through mundane activities. There are no racing speed boats and high speed car chases through exotic streets, instead there are subtle moves and operations set up to try to out maneuver the Soviet spymaster Karla. In a TV analogy the espionage world of Le Carre in the Smiley novels (of which, I should have mentioned earlier, this is the conclusion to a trilogy) is like "The Wire" or, sort of, "Homicide", as opposed to any of the hour long police procedurals with their fast resolution and instant results (and I guess that makes Smiley sort of a fat, short, white Lester). The slow meticulous unfolding and the little details in both the shows mentioned and the Smiley novels might seem a little labored at points but their end payoff is greater than the 44 minute resolution of "CSI" or say a James Bond film.I wasn't sure where I was going with this review at the start, it was actually going to be a review for Crumley's The Last Good Kiss, but instead Smiley's People seemed a better move to come off of my ramblings about movies with. Sorry I'm too lazy to get the accent over the final E in the authors name.
What is so exhilarating and fulfilling about reading le Carré is the sense of genuine intelligence at play, both in the characters and in the author. There are different ways of trying to convey great cleverness in a literary character: one approach is to give them superhuman deductive skills à la Sherlock Holmes, you know – I perceive, sir, that you have recently returned from a hunting excursion in Wiltshire and that your wife's tennis partner owns a dachshund called Gerald — But my dear fellow, how could you possibly?! — Quite elementary; the leaf that adheres to your left boot-sole is unmistakably from a holm oak, one of the rarest English trees, a fine specimen of which grows outside Wiltshire's best-frequented hunting lodge; you may perhaps have glanced at my recent monograph on the subject in the Evening Post which proved so useful in the recent unpleasantness concerning the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro… And so on. Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff – but it's a game, it's amusing, it's manifestly nonsense. The thrill of what le Carré does in the Karla trilogy – and I don't believe anyone does it better – is of a completely different order. You believe it: the leaps of intuition are logical and motivated, and just slightly out of your reach, so that you constantly feel both flattered to be keeping up and somewhat awestruck at how they always make the connections a bit faster than you do. It's rather like how I feel when I play through top-level chess games, the sense that you can just about follow why they're doing what they're doing; the deceptive conviction, as you watch an unexpected rook sacrifice, that it all makes perfect sense and that you would undoubtedly have thought of the same move yourself.This is hard to do as a writer. Because writers are often not that smart, even when they're talented. Le Carré writes as though he's smarter than all his readers, and when I read him I'm convinced. The thrills in these books come not from action sequences, but from the plausibility of the dialogue: I was more on edge during Smiley's calm ‘interrogation’ of Toby Esterhase here than I've been in any number of car chase or bomb-defusion scenes. What to say next? How to press them in exactly the right way, without scaring them off?In a sense this book is composed simply of a number of these intense, magesterially-written duologues stacked together, a stichomythic layer-cake: Smiley and Lacon, Smiley and Mikhel, Smiley and Esterhase, Smiley and Connie, Smiley and Grigoriev, Smiley and Alexandra…and always, at the end, the prospect of somehow reaching the the endgame conversation, between Smiley and Karla. (It would be quiet and undramatic, and fascinating.) But then again, the whole trilogy is that conversation being played out.These dialogues are stitched together with a prose style that is economical and unclichéd. The plot is thick and chewy and le Carré does not cheat with his exposition. Perhaps overall The Honourable Schoolboy was my favourite – I just love the oblique portrayal of foreign reporting – but this is a stupendous end to a brilliant trilogy. A lot of books are clever – ‘oh that's clever,’ you might say after a literary trick or a narrative sleight-of-hand. These books are intelligent. That's rare enough in fiction as it is, and the fact that it comes in so-called genre fiction just shows how distracting such ghettos can be.
What do You think about Smiley's People (2002)?
The conclusion of the trilogy that starts with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; but, while that book is about betrayal, this one is about manipulation. The heartbreaking message is that, when you want to manipulate someone, the most effective approach is not to try and exploit their weaknesses. Needless to say, that can work too. But the very best way is to exploit their kindness, their decency, and the things that make them a worthwhile human being. It's been done in many other books too, of course, though rarely as well as le Carré does it here.
—Manny
From IDMb:Called out of retirement to settle the affairs of a friend, Smiley finds his old organization, the Circus, so overwhelmed by political considerations that it doesn't want to know what happened. He begins to follow up the clues of his friends past days, discovering that the clues lead to a high person in the Russian Secret service, and a secret important enough to kill for. Smiley continues to put together the pieces a step ahead or a step behind the Russian killers.A movie was made based on this book and it's available at YouTube, with Alec Guinness, Curd Jürgens, Eileen Atkins.Duration: 360 min. in 6 episodesSome trivia about this series may be found here.
—Laura
More excellent work from Mr. le Carre. A thoughtful, fascinating page-turner about spies handcuffed by bureaucracy, specifically le Carre's prime spy, George Smiley, who in retirement is given the opportunity to take down his long-time nemesis, Karla (and if you haven't read the books, Karla is not a woman but a code name whose explanation I haven't read.)I picked this up partly because I wanted something with a London setting because I'm writing a story set in London and I've never been there. Absolutely nothing in this novel helped me in that regard, as almost all the London scenes are indoors, but the way le Carre uses setting to enhance mood is a good lesson/reminder to any writer. I hate reading long-winded descriptions and le Carre, as a storyteller, is deft at dropping descriptive phrases into the midst of an action scene to further tighten my chest as I read of another good person's suffering.And the people who suffer in this novel - le Carre makes it clear that they are good by their actions, and the bad guys are definitely evil but not without explanation (explanation that causes our hero to wonder if he would have reacted any better - to wonder whether he is any better than his horrible rival).I am no doubt missing some of the character development that has taken place over the series of Smiley novels, as thus far I have read but two, yet there is character development within this novel that surprised me and, of course, furthered the story. Presumably this is not surprising to regular readers of le Carre, but there are scenes of such brilliance (Smiley's interview with his former co-worker Connie extends across about 20 pages of what is primarily narrative as told in dialogue, yet the story told is so riveting that I felt like only a moment had passed and I had somehow absorbed vast amounts of information, whereas an important scene with Smiley's ex-wife Ann takes only three pages but those pages are crucial to understanding Smiley, and not just in regard to his feelings toward Ann.)The other le Carre novel I've read, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was excellent. This one, which I believe is two novels later in the series, is better. Maybe I'll change my mind about that when I reread them, but first I have quite a few more le Carre novels to read for the first time.
—Rob
