Day: November 26, 2007

I didn’t enjoy Night Train from Martin Amis. The author is famous for many things, including being famous as a contrarian public intellectual. (English authors pull that off even better than the late Norman Mailer did in this country.) He’s not famous for this book, and he shouldn’t be. It’s brief, and the female policewoman (notably, “I am police”) actually raises our interest in the suicide which gives the book its jumping-off point. (Re-reading that…sort of unfortunate phrasing on my part. But the suicide was by gun, not plunge. Anyway…) But we’re left unsatisfied on purpose, and whatever art that took, it just annoyed me as a reader.

The 1998 NYTimes book review is more positive. I can see the points made by the reviewer, but he’s clearly a fan (or at least a consumer) of the entire Amis bibliography. I won’t rush to the next one.

The library “books you should read” table got me again. No complaints about this one, though.

John Le Carre is a known entity, but not to me. Smiley’s People is my first Le Carré read, though I did catch a recent movie.

Despite missing the first two books of the trilogy, I fell in with Smiley’s return to old territory and previous fights. For such an inward-looking book, Smiley keeps his distance. While we’re privy to his thoughts, Smiley is always “he” not “I’ — we just happened to be privileged to secret information. Not all, and not enough, but closer to the veil than others. The action picks up throughout the story, and Smiley does move about notably for an old spy (supposedly retired by this time). Still, it’s Smiley’s memories which slow him down the most.

I didn’t lean in at first, but I was eager to finish the book over the Thanksgiving break, so the tale clearly grew on me. I’ll have to decide whether to delve in at the beginning.