Call For The Dead - John le Carre
George Smiley, overweight and of a quiet disposition, an
intelligence officer who has seen too much and done too much, is one of Le
Carre’s most famous characters and is featured in many of his novels, including
Smiley’s People and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (the book that secured Le
Carre’s worldwide reputation). In Call For The Dead, Smiley is a weary agent
and ready for retirement, yet he cannot refuse one last desperate call for his
services. He returns one more time to solve a baffling case involving a
murdered colleague, a twisted former hero of Germany and a once-beautiful,
tortured woman with a terrifying secret.
A cross between Fleming’s Bond and Christie’s Poirot, Smiley
is a lovable character with a complicated past. His wife left him for a
suntanned Cuban lover, his apprentice is now working for the enemy and his only
joy is his profession, which provides him with colleagues as equally obscure in
character and origin as he is. Previously an Oxford student of 17th
Century German literature, his tutor knew George was not destined to a future in academia, and
encourages him to join the Secret Service. Now a few decades later, Smiley,
sick of office work and much younger agents taking over all the work, is on the
brink of retirement, when a colleague is found dead in his house. A
type-written note and pistol accompanies his former colleague and the department call it in as a
suicide, but Smiley trusts his gut instinct and interviews the widow. He leaves
the house, unsettled, and so begins a cat-and-mouse chase, leaving him in
hospital, his associates in danger and a former agent of his trying to silence
him.
John Le Carre himself studied at Oxford, taught at Eton and
then later joined the British Foreign Service. His real name is, in fact, David
Cornwell and he is often described as the best spy novelist of the last
century.
Goddess - Kelly Gardiner
Based on the true story of a woman known as La Maupin, this
is an fascinating account of a sword-fighting, opera-singing girl from the
courts of 17th Century Versailles. The whole story is written from
the perspective of Julie confessing to all her escapades and adventures to a
young priest who’s been tasked with writing down her last confession as she
lies in her convent deathbed.
Julie-Emilie d’Aubigny, known as Mademoiselle de Maupin, is
taught to fence at the court of the Sun king. At 13 she is taken mistress by
the King’s Master Of Horse. Tempestuous and swashbuckling, after two years she
has run away from court carving out a name for herself with her fencing skills
across France. After taking a nun for a lover, facing exile and duelling with
some of France’s most powerful men (not to mention winning of course), she
returns to the convent to where she followed her lover all those years ago.
Only in her thirties, she is fever-ridden and dying but has had such a
marvellous life, packed with fights, opera and balls.
Although a work of fiction, Goddess is an interpretation of the
life of the very real Julie. Her adventures were documented by diarists, chroniclers
and eighteenth-century theatre historians. Gardiner has compiled all the
account with evidence and compiled them into a fantastic book of romance and
feminism in a time where France was ruled by men.
The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell
A book I
didn’t want to pick up. Yes you read that correctly. I was so tense with
anticipation and fear I was so scared to turn another page. The Silent
Companions is a sinister tale of newly married, newly widowed Elsie, who is
sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s eerie manor, The Bridge.
The maids ignore her, the villagers resent her, and so she finds herself with
only her husband’s shy cousin for company… or so she thinks. Inside The Bridge,
hidden in the rat-infested attic are the Silent Companions, wooden figures with
eyes painted so well that they literally follow Elsie around the room. When the
cousin discovers a diary in the attic, written by a past lady of the manor,
Elsie starts to suspect the contents of the attic aren’t just decorations and slowly
realises how close a resemblance the figures have to the past occupants of the
cursed manor from the diary. A year later she awakes in a psychiatry hospital,
covered in severe burns. Charged for murder and delirious on morphine, she must
recount her tales to a young doctor, the only one willing to prove her
innocence.
As the
book neared the end, the mystery and terror seemed to calm down and I finally
let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding. Dear me was I wrong, with only
a few pages to go I got the breath
knocked out of my body with one final twist, making sure that I wouldn’t sleep
that night.
Through a
combination of first and third person, this book builds tension in such a way I
was too scared to turn the next page. The book switches between present tense
in the 19th Century, to the diary of a woman. Every draught, every
movement round a corner, every creek of wood in that old manor, I felt from the
safety of my cosy bed. Any lovers of Weeping Angels or The Woman in Black are
sure to love this fantastic piece by Purcell. She is a former bookseller from
Colchester, and her first novel The Silent Companions was published to
widespread critical acclaim and was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice. I am
certainly looking for her next book The Corset, another Victorian-gothic novel,
which came out recently.
(Warning:
Don’t read just before bed time!)
