I’m enjoying a
cup of Chai this morning while the day is still cool, and am looking forward to
an afternoon that includes at least a few hours of reading, although I’m not
sure what I will read next. Hmmm…
My volunteer book club met yesterday to discuss John le Carré’s fairly autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy (1986). I started reading it last Sunday. I figured, 600
pages, 6 days, no problem! I’m not
working right now, so I have lots of time to read! Well, the first day I only managed about 50
pages, and not for want of trying. So on
Monday, I thought, OK, I have to read 150 pages today to make up for yesterday’s
shortfall. I nearly made up this page
count by Wednesday, and by Thursday I was way ahead of the game, which left me
only 50 pages to read on Friday. I tell
you this because it may give you a sense of how long it took this book to become
interesting for me, based on the enthusiasm I had for my reading “assignment”. But by the end, while I was happy to finish,
I was glad I read it. I was not, therefore,
surprised to find that, of the six members who came out for the meeting, only
three had finished it (well, two had finished and one was 100 pages from the
end before she ran out of time, but she’s probably finished by now), and one of
those people didn’t enjoy it. The other
three people didn’t even get to page 200 before they gave up. I
admitted that, if I hadn’t had to read it for the group, and let’s face it, I
picked to book for the list so I really had to make an effort to finish it, I
probably would have given up, too. Some
of the reasons people gave up on it: too
many characters to keep track of; didn’t know what was going on; who was
narrating the story, anyway?; jumped around too much, not told in chronological
order; and finally, who were the good guys?.
Even those of us who finished it weren’t sure who all the characters
were, which countries they worked for, who they were married to,and what their
relationships were to the other characters, although we all agreed that there
were no “good guys”, except perhaps Magnus Pym, in his way, and a few minor characters. In my opinion, this was OK, because while
this reader was often in a state of confusion, I was better able to appreciate
the identity crisis and lack of clear understanding about the other characters
that the main character was experiencing at the time the story
takes place. Here is how the publisher's marketing department summarizes this novel: “Magnus
Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and
a secret agent. Pym’s life, it is
revealed, is entirely made up of secrets.
Dominated by a father who is also a confidence trickster on an epic
scale, Pym has from the age of seventeen been controlled by two mentors. It is these two, racing each other and time
itself, who are orchestrating the search to find the perfect spy” (http://www.amazon.com/A-Perfect-Spy-Novel/dp/0143119761). Sounds like an awesome page-turner, doesn’t
it? Think The Constant Gardener or
Our Kind of Traitor (the only other two I have read by this
author). Having now read this book, I feel that the summary offered by Wikipedia is more accurate: “A novel
about the mental and moral dissolution of a high level secret agent” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Spy). Pym’s disappearance occurs after his father’s
death, during which time he secludes himself in a room in an isolated house in a remote small town by
the sea, tended to by elderly Miss Dubber and her cat Toby. During
this time, he writes a memoir explaining to his friends and family, mainly to
his son, Tom, why he became a double agent and betrayed the British
Intelligence Service. Throughout his
life, he was forced to take on so many personalities and personae that his own
mental acuity became fractured. He may
have been “a perfect spy”, but he was too sensitive and aware, and this sensitivity, this desire to make things right for everyone, ultimately
cost him his soul. In my own notes, I suggest that
this novel explores what it means to be a spy, the trials, the
uncertainties, the suspicions that are ever-present, the sense of never really knowing what is true and what is guise, who to
trust and who to renounce, the duplicitous nature of spying and how it can interfere
with one’s own sense of identity. This
is something I have found in the early episodes of the BBC series, “MI5”. In the first two seasons, when Tom and Zoe are
agents, this is explored quite extensively.
The difficulties in having relationships with those outside the Service,
and the effect of taking on many different identities over a period of time, in
the interest of the job, are just two of the challenges this series presents. (note:
later seasons become more action-oriented, more James Bond-like, so for me, less interesting and enjoyable). One of the members who finished the book also
mentioned that le Carré’s writing is excellent, that his descriptions are
outstanding. I have one such description
that I want to share with you here. Before
his disappearance, Pym meets up with his first wife, Belinda, from whom he has
been divorced for many years. She is
older and heftier than she once was, more severe and angry, as Pym notes: “Yet her beauty clung to her like an identity
she was trying to deny and her plainness kept slipping like a bad disguise.” (p
297 in my Penguin copy) How beautiful
and succinct a statement about her, one that totally captures her in a single
sentence. I think I can conclude this
section by saying that le Carré is a brilliant writer, whose books may be worth
the effort it takes to read them to the end, if you can let go of the need to understand everything that is going on as well as who all the characters are.
That’s all I have for today.
Not sure what I will read next, but it will definitely be something new
and Canadian. I’ll let you know next
week.
Bye for now…
Julie
Julie
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