'Tinker, Tailor...' Anyone?, or, New Life in Venice

'Who will spy on the spies?' What unlikely Hercules (in a trench coat) will 'clean the stables'?

The big news so far from the Venice Film Festival has been the critical raves for Tomas Alfredson's new adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring no less than Gary Oldman (as George Smiley), Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Ciarán Hinds, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong...: an amazing cast. (The film opens at the end of next week in the UK and Ireland, and in early December in the US.)

Le Carré's novel, which, along with the 1979 BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness, taught most of the English-speaking world the term 'mole' (in the sense of embedded double agent, 'defector in place': who is the mole?), was the first, and best-remembered, in the so-called Karla trilogy, but Smiley had been a recurring character in le Carré's books since Call for the Dead (1961).

The new film has received enthusiastic reviews in the Guardian and the Telegraph (which also used the occasion this morning to salute le Carré himself).

I've just been realizing that I haven't read the novel since the 1970s. I have a habit of yielding with very little resistance to the marketer's general exhortation to 'read the book, see the movie' (which I'd like to blog about another time, but which obviously plays a role even in my choice of 'content' for this blog)--and it wasn't long ago that I decided that any book I hadn't read for seven or more years I could count as more or less unread. So I've downloaded a copy of Tinker, Tailor… and will be inhaling it soon. (Yes, sometimes Jascha just reads!)

The purpose of this post is to invite you to join me in the process. This is one of the few times I'll roll out all the links at my disposal: Kindle UK, iBooks UK, Kindle US, nook, Kindle Germany and iBooks Germany. I'd love to hear what you think of both the book and the film. (Of course, if you have problems with these or any other links, let me know that, too, and I'll do my best to fix what's wrong.) So let's... stay in touch....

30 Days Hath September

I've been away from you for longer than I like, and, with the help of some advice from my sifu (Anthony Korahais), I'm vowing to do better in this new month. In a number of our qigong classes, he's proposed that we make resolutions for the month of September, things that we vow to do every day for these 30 days. (You'll often hear that if you want to establish a new habit, it's a good idea to repeat the action in question every day for 21 days. Thirty days? All the better.)

So I'm vowing to blog every day this month--and to practice qigong every morning. The first vow is partly an experiment: to see not so much whether I can do it (after all, I have decades of journalling behind me) as what happens when I do.

It may seem like a strange way to begin, but I'd be remiss if I didn't write something about two ebooks that appeared this morning, one in the UK and the other internationally.

What I'm calling the UK ebook is the first English-language edition of Jo Nesbø's novel Headhunters. (The US edition will appear next week.) I've been singing Nesbø's praises for years, usually talking about the Harry Hole series (nine crime novels to date, of which The Snowman was most recently published in the US), which still seem to be the books for which he's most likely to be remembered. But only a handful of the Hole novels are available in the US, and the first two haven't been published in English anywhere. For readers who are ready for something very different, the standalone Headhunters may be the ideal choice. It's been called a 'caper' novel, and I always describe it as 'freewheeling'. The less one knows about the plot in advance the better--but I can say that the title refers to corporate headhunting, that surprising crimes are involved, and that this is one of those novels in which two adversaries face off repeatedly, through all the turns of a shifting game of cat and mouse. It's also an amazing book to have written--in its own very different way almost as daring as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Will you still be thinking about it a week after you finish it? Quite possibly not--for that, read the Harry Hole novels instead. (Not that you have to choose!)

It's also worth mentioning that all of Jo Nesbø's revenues from Headhunters (in Norway and internationally, from the novel and the films based on it) go to the Harry Hole Foundation, for reading and writing programs in the Third World.

More widely publicized is this morning's release, in the US and the UK, of Stephen King's eformat-only novella Mile 81. Again, it would hardly be the one work by Stephen King that I would recommend as a starting place--but with King fewer people are looking for a starting place than with Nesbø: people may not agree about Stephen King, but most people are comfortable with their own take on him, whether they love the entire corpus (and, in some cases, read little else), strongly prefer one phase or genre over another, or view him with considerable condescension. (For the record, I personally champion the King of the later short stories but find that we neglect any of him at our peril.) But if you consider yourself a King fan, you will likely enjoy Mile 81 (which plays both the automobile-horror and the childhood cards) and the appended preview of the next full-length King book, 11/22/63, which is due in November.

I'd like to note one (further?) milestone, as I see it, in the publication of Mile 81: it's an ebook-only publication but no one is harping on the fact. There's no illusion that the novella's eformattedness is news. We've come a long way since Riding the Bullet and The Plant....

Jo Nesbø, Inspector Harry Hole and the 'Oslo Trilogy'

I'm guessing that most U.S. readers either don't know Jo Nesbø, the bestselling Norwegian crime novelist, or have taken note of him only recently in their quest for something to read after they've finished Stieg Larsson. The story is somewhat different in the U.K., where the six Harry Hole novels that have been translated into English all figure prominently on the Kindle bestseller list. U.S. rights to forthcoming Hole novels recently went to Knopf, who will be giving a big launch to Nesbø's The Snowman in May, and I predict that Nesbø's U.S. visibility 'problem' will then be a thing of the past. I'll blog more about Nesbø, whom I greatly admire, between now and then; today I'll do my bit to make him slightly more visible by posting links to the Kindle editions of the three Hole novels available now in the U.S.: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star. They form a trilogy of sorts, and it would be a shame not to read them in order. How do they stack up against that other trilogy? I predict that all you'll miss is a female character as powerful as Lisbeth Salander. Everything else is there, and then some.

John le Carré, 'Our Kind of Traitor'

I had the amazing good fortune to read the new John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor, as a relative innocent. (I say 'relative' because those of us old enough to remember the first publication of his breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [1963] all lost some of our innocence the day we read it.) What I mean is that I was able to approach Our Kind of Traitor without having read or heard anything about its plot. When 'the reader' finds out, fully 20% of the way into the novel (Kindle readers track their progress through a book in percentage points, not pages), what sort of 'operation' Traitor will depict, that was my first knowledge of it; similarly with the question of what particular issues or forms of criminal activity form the thematic backdrop for the novel. I'm determined not to spoil your innocence in these regards, if you're fortunate enough to have it  still intact. I'll reveal nothing more than that I liked the book, like it even more upon reflection--but feel very much that, especially where this book is concerned, liking or not liking can be something of a red herring: in the rush to judge, we can easily trip over our own feet. I do think that every reader will appreciate in Traitor the voice of a master storyteller (and master narrator, which is not quite the same thing: Traitor is an example of le Carré at his most overtly Conradian)--even if we don't have the good fortune of hearing le Carré voicing his own prose--and I strive to give even 'lesser' writers than le Carré the benefit of the doubt in this sense: instead of dismissing a work (or issuing demerits to it) when it doesn't meet ordinary expectations, I try to 'give it its head' (like a horse) and appreciate (as carefully as possible) where it takes me. Readers may not expect espionage novels (if that's what Traitor is) to linger as long as this one does getting out of the gate or (trust me on this) to cross the finish line with such a burst of speed--but we all choose at such moments whether to stop reading or whether to start. There will be readers for whom the greatest interest of Our Kind of Traitor will lie not in its panoply of often surprisingly sympathetic characters or its treatment of 'issues' but in what in it runs counter to commonly held beliefs about narrative. The choice is yours.