Bob Alpert

Wednesdays, February 10 - April 28   3:30 p.m - 5:30 p.m    12 sessions
Vincent Club, 71 Brimmer Street

In 1961 a former Eton schoolmaster and MI6 operative, David Cornwell, published his first novel Call for the Dead and in 1962 his second A Murder of Quality. Both novels received good reviews but were on the whole unnoticed. Back then the world was entranced by the escapades of James Bond. In 1963 Cornwell, writing under the name of John Le Carré, published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The reaction to it was ecstatic and explosive. Graham Greene called it “The Best Spy Novel I have ever read”. The book remained on the New York Times list of best sellers for a year. In 2006 Publisher’s Weekly named it the “best spy novel of all time.” John Le Carré has never looked back and shows no indications of coming in from the cold – from his explorations of the desperate, treacherous and banal world of espionage. His work has the bleakness of Conrad, the passion of Greene and the irony of Chandler. The compelling intricacy of his plots is unmatched. He is also the creator of the most elusive and, I would argue, most unsettling protagonist in modern fiction – George Smiley. James Bond, that nonsensical figure of the cold war, is handsome, sexually athletic and mentally narcotic. George Smiley is a fat, lumbering, cuckolded recluse who spends his time reading 17th century manuscripts.  But he is not someone one would want for an enemy. To watch his methodical but relentless unraveling of seemingly impenetrable mysteries is to observe what I would call the workings of a gentle but lethal mind. I cannot think of another character like him.

I invite you to read Le Carré’s best Smiley novels with me: Call for the Dead, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Smiley’s People. Le Carré’s treatment of the workings of the British Espionage establishment (aptly dubbed “The Circus”) is a Comedy of Manners worthy of Thackeray. The moral imperatives driving his work go back to Shakespeare, Webster, and Everyman.

Bob Alpert is a graduate of Harvard College. After receiving his M.A. in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught at York School in Monterey, California. He returned to Boston and taught at Harvard College and Boston College, where he received his Ph.D. Mr. Alpert has written on various authors ranging from Dryden to Nabokov and has translated The Odyssey and The Iliad and more recently Oedipus Turranos – the world’s first detective story.