Yup, it's time for another one of these! I had planned on doing two articles like I had in previous years, but I definitely did not read as much this year. (I mostly blame the Nintendo Switch I picked up last December.) Still, I did read some pretty interesting stuff, and I ended up having a lot to say about these books. This one is a long one, but here are all the books I read in 2024.
Single & Single (1999)by John le CarréAs usual, I ended up getting some more books for Christmas, and since my family knows that I've recently become a fan of le Carré, I got this one last Christmas. A much later book than the ones I've read so far, it focuses on the 90s instead of the 60s or 70s, but otherwise, it's another decent spy thriller, albeit a sloppy one.
Tiger Single and his son Oliver run the business firm Single & Single, initially dedicated to being a bridge between Soviet Russia and the Western World. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinks were looking bleak, but as the decade went on, Single & Single were doing unusually well. When Oliver decided to look into the details, he discovered his father was now fronting a money laundering scheme for his former Soviet partners. Upon this revelation, Oliver then goes to the British Customs and Excise department to let them know what's going on, eventually becoming a spy for them.
However, the story actually starts a few years later, in the late 90s, where Oliver has been in hiding, living a second life as a children's magician act. When he learns about a strange murder in Turkey and sees a massive donation to his child's bank trust, he realizes things have turned for the worst. His leader at Customs Excise reaches out to him and sends him on a mission to go find his now missing father, get to the bottom of what Single & Single were really doing, and catch the criminals responsible.
While this seems relatively straight-forward as a spy thriller story, le Carré's writing obfuscates a lot of it with extended flashbacks filled with bizarre half-descriptions. We spend a lot of time with Oliver first joining the company and being named a partner, as well as getting to know the backgrounds and ambitions of all the Soviet partners. And then, once the stakes get set and things jump back to the present for espionage sections, Oliver ends up being a strange character to follow. Sometimes he's brilliant and confident, but other times he's led along by a figurative rope and just acting out motions because he's told to. His motivation is focused on protecting his wife and little daughter from the corruption of the company, but much time is spent with his various affairs over the years, including a new one that develops as the story goes on. He feels like an inconsistent cypher, being whatever the scene needs him to be as he drifts through the plot.
Reading this has been strange, especially when compared to le Carré's work in the 60s, where he is so much more terse and direct. Sure, those older books a lot of details to track, but they would be put in their places to complete a satisfying puzzle. Here, with Single & Single, there's a lot more figurative language to sort through, and there were even times where I wasn't sure who was in a scene or not, especially as Oliver lapses in and out of flashbacks. While the pieces did eventually come together, it wasn't as satisfying this time, as there was a lot of fluff that I felt I had to take seriously because you never know what will be important in the future when it comes to reading a thriller. That being said, I don't think it's a bad book, and it is interesting to see this author, best known for Cold War stories, take a stab at what a post-Soviet thriller would be like, focusing much more on the corruption of systems and economics. It's not as recommendable as his earlier works, but I enjoyed it well enough.
The Great Tales of Middle-Earth (2007,2017,2018)by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
After
reading The Silmarillion, I wanted to dig even deeper into Tolkien's Legendarium, so as another gift from last year, I got the trilogy of Great Tales as a boxset, containing extended works of the three most developed stories of the First Age. Painstakingly collated and edited by his son, Christopher, these are writings Tolkien had planned to turn into novels or other extended works, but wasn't able to finish them before he passed away. While they certainly are fascinating reads, it's hard not to feel like these are extras to the main stories rather than stand-alone novels themselves.
The first one, The Children of Hurin, is the one that feels the most like a complete novel. Building upon the story told in The Silmarillion, it expands many of the scenes with dialog and great description of locations and the characters' actions. However, the tone from The Silmarillion is also carried over, making for something of a rather dry read. While the concept of fate is very much bound to the tragic tale of Turin Turambar and his sister Nienor, it really does feel like characters are largely being pushed around rather than following their own desires or goals. Still, the story does a decent job of pulling me back into Middle-Earth, with all sorts of interactions between men, elves, dwarves, orcs, and a rather devious dragon. While the ending is a downer, inspired by the tragedy of Kullervo from Finnish folklore from what I understand, it makes for a decent read that may not excite, but is mostly enjoyable as stays quite focused on the tale at hand.
While The Children of Hurin takes place slightly after the story of Beren and Luthien, it was the first of the Tales to come out, probably because it was the most complete of the three. However, ten years later, Christopher pulled together this collection of the classic tale that has been a cornerstone of the lore since it was referenced in The Lord of the Rings.
Instead of just having one story, we're given a sequence of iterations on the story, weaving between different collected works to show, in piece-meal, how the story evolved. The first version feels more like a fairy tale, introducing Tevildo, the prince of cats, who would not stay in later versions. As the story become more serious, though, J.R.R. Tolkien wanted it as a grand poem, epic in scope and style. However, this makes for a bit of rough reading, especially when sentences start and end in the middle of lines. It feels like I'm stumbling through the rhythm rather than following it. Combined with some half-decent, half-tedious descriptions that don't really broaden the story, it's quite the task, unless you're willing to power through it.
It's a shame, too, as the story of Beren and Luthien is actually pretty cool. Beren is a human being hunted by the evil Morgoth, and when he reaches the forests of Doriath, he stumbles in Luthien dancing about, and the two fall in love. However, Luthien's father, King Thingol, isn't happy about his princess falling in love with a human, so he gives him the impossible quest of getting one of the Silmarils from Morgoth's Iron Throne. From there, it becomes a great adventure for the star-crossed couple, running into all sorts of intrigues and villains before going up to Morgoth himself.
When I got this trilogy of books, I really was hoping to get novels for these great tales. While The Children of Hurin mostly succeeded, this one unfortunately lets me down, focusing much more on the evolution of a tale rather than in the telling. I get that Christopher was dead set on preserving his father's words with no editorializing, and that's admirable, but for someone wanting to dig more in the characters and lore of Middle-Earth, it's definitely disappointing, though Beren and Luthien has some good moments buried in the slog. I can't recommend it, and I imagine most folks would probably be better served by just reading its related chapter in the Silmarillion.
The Fall of Gondolin takes place later than the other two stories and focuses on Tuon and his noble quest to keep Melko/Morgoth away from the hidden city, which was the last bastion of power against evil at the end of the First Age. It takes the same structure as
Beren and Luthien, going through various iterations and changes to the tale as Tolkien worked it over. It seems, however, that this story was always pretty serious from the beginning, and while the different iterations are interesting, there wasn't much that changed over the years. Mostly it's about how Tolkien fleshed out the details with each telling of the tale. I enjoyed this one more than
Beren and Luthien, but again, I imagine most folks would again be better served with the
Silmarillion version of this story.
Overall, though, this is quite a nice collection. A major part of that is over there on the right: the artwork. They went and got classic Middle-Earth artist Alan Lee, and illustrations are amazing through all three books. They evoke a kind of interesting blend of gothic tones and organic nature that really captures the feel of the First Age quite well. It's a great boxset, looking quite nice on the shelf, but the contents were a mixed bag, despite the intriguing evolution of the tales.
The Karla Trilogy (1974, 1977, 1979)by John le CarréGuess what? More Christmas books! I actually got these three in another three-in-one collection, so I was able to read through this trilogy one after the other. The 70s were definitely a different style for le Carré, as we see the author start to flex his figurative language with these ones. Still, they remain a fascinating trilogy, exploring the seedy, dry, tedious underbelly of the spying world as the Cold War lingered on.
The first is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is mainly focused on reestablishing George Smiley as the main character and introducing a new rival named Karla, who is the head of the Russian's spy organization, called Moscow Centre. After a shift in power at the Circus, Smiley is forced to retire. However, not long after, the British government comes to him on the side, telling him of the possibility of a mole in the Circus. From there, Smiley launches into an investigation of a handful of incidents, seeking to identify the double-agent who has entrenched himself in the British spy service. After having seen the movie and the TV series, reading this was interesting, as it gave me a lot more detail to work with, helping me piece the flow together better. The TV series is pretty faithful, but the movie changed a lot of the details and skimming over others. Still, both are pretty satisfying as adaptations go.
One thing I did pick up on reading the book was a major theme of England's loss of relevance to the Cold War's global political scene. Many of the characters Smiley interacts with are often reminiscent of what England was like during World War 2, full of confidence as a major player on the world stage. However, as their efforts in fight communism have trudged on, there's a recognition that England is fading underneath the rise of the superpowers: the United States and Soviet Russia. In fact, Karla's whole scheme in this book outright proves England's irrelevance, as the Circus is used as a tool to get access to their true goal: American intelligence. This leaves many of the characters in an encroaching malaise, as they each struggle with their obsolescence in their own way. Still, it was a pretty good read, despite knowing the end from the beginning, as it was interesting to see how Smiley put the pieces together from a broad bank of information to draw from. And it does a good job of establishing the new status quo for the books to follow.
(using the British spelling here) was a different experience, as I was going in completely blind. The TV series skipped this one, as it deal a lot with southeast Asia, and they figured they didn't have the budget to pull that off. Picking up right where Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy left off, George Smiley is now in charge of the Circus and is keen on cleaning up the mess the mole had left behind in an effort to find more info on Karla and his operations. In the middle of this, one of Smiley's agents, Jerry Westerby (who did show up in the first book) seems to have picked up on a possible money laundering scheme Karla has set up in Hong Kong. The money went to a Chinese business man named Drake Ko so that he could extract his brother Nelson Ko out of China and into Russian control to get intel on China's operations. However, the Circus thinks they can get their hands on him instead, which would be a great boon for them.
This book is the longest of the three, and it's not even close. This is largely because Le Carré really wanted to convey the atmosphere of 70s Hong Kong, resulting in long passages where characters don't do much but soak in the scene. Later, Jerry ends up in south-east Asia, near the fighting of the Vietnam War, allowing the author to go on about the terrible conditions of the people living there as a consequence of the violence. There's also a lot more internal politics going on, as the Circus desperately tries to justify its existence to the British government, as well as manage their relationship with their American counterparts, who have their own agenda with the Ko brothers. Overall, there really is a lot going on, so it really takes a while for the story to get where it's going.
Thinking about it, it ends up being like a weird blend of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Looking Glass War, in that it focuses a lot on how the cold, calculating nature of British spies seems unsuited for some folks who either want glory or romance, and how a faithful spy ends up becoming a victim of circumstances outside of his control. Jerry Westerby is the one on the ground for most of this book, and while he's not a bad character, it's also hard not to pity him sometimes. Presented against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, it's hard not feel like the whole book is an argument about the pointless gain of hard-fought and measured effort when it's all just going to fall apart anyway. While I don't think this was a bad book, per se, but it definitely felt like a downer after how well the first book had set things up. I might have liked the book better if it wasn't such a slog.
Which brings us to the last book of the trilogy,
Smiley's People. Smiley is retired (again), but gets pulled out of mothballs when an agent he was in charge of in the past suddenly turns up dead. The folks in the British government are nervous about a scandal, so they recruit Smiley to look over the situation and make sure there isn't anything that they can't quietly sweep under the rug. However, it turns out this agent has links to evidence that brings Smiley back to his rivalry with Karla, this time with an advantage he didn't have before.
Like I mentioned in
my review of the TV series, George Smiley is mostly on his own this time around. While he does reach out to friends, both old and new (to the reader, anyway), he does much of the legwork himself, literally and figuratively. As a consequence, we spend a lot of time in Smiley's head, making this book quite the psychological examination of the character. While the detective work is fascinating enough, seeing Smiley wrangle with his foibles, ones that the case seems keen on exasperating, show him at his most human compared to other books. As a consequence, it also turns the villain Karla rather human as well, as the parallels are made somewhat apparent between the two characters.
I admit I did enjoy this one more than The Honourable Schoolboy, but I will admit it wasn't as satisfying as the first book in the trilogy. Whatever triumph Smiley may have seems to be more personal, if he has any at all, as he debates whether or not he is just another monster like his notorious rival. While it does bring much of everything to a close, it's hard not to feel the bittersweetness of the scenario, likely bringing much of le Carré's own malaise about the Cold War to the surface. Through the novel, he seems to be asking question if all that espionage was really worth it or not, without any conclusive answers.
Overall, it's been a very interesting dip into this world again. The Cold War might have been the height of relevance when these books were written, but for someone like me, the conflict (or lack thereof) is very much past tense. As a consequence, it makes the world le Carré creates feel almost fantastical, whether he intended to or not. I suppose the same thing happens to a lot of fiction that seeks to capture the moment, only to end up as historical fiction on accident; time capsules of their own era, filled with concerns and anxieties unique to the time. I generally enjoyed the books, but I wonder if my sense of distance doesn't defang some of the impact. At the very least, I think I'm going to set Cold War spy thrillers aside for a while, as I think I've reached my point of satiation with them. Next year books should be quite different, I think.
This year was kind of a weird one for reading. Maybe having the Conan theme helped, not only in reading a lot of Conan, but being inspired to read in general, as there were times where I wanted to take a break from it as well. Still, it was neat to get through some classic spy fiction as well as some Middle-Earth lore. I do have some big plans for what I want to read next year, but it will be kind of complicated. (I'll try to explain when I get to it.) I do have to say that I have been reading a lot more these past few years than I used to, and I wonder if these articles aren't a part of that. Once I finish a book, I get excited to give it a write up and talk about it. I don't know who all is even reading these things, but at the very least, it's sort of a record of what I've been up to in recent years. As for the blog, I think I've got one or two more articles coming before the end of the year, so look forward to those.
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