Being stuck at home with a cold yesterday, I went looking for Kindle books to read; and since I’d read and enjoyed John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its immediate sequels a few months ago, Amazon suggested I try The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I started it with some trepidation; Tinker and its successors are not easy books, requiring patience and much reading between the lines. I knew Spy was worth the effort, but I wasn’t sure whether I was up to making it. As it happens, I needn’t have worried. I don’t know whether Spy is really easier to follow, or whether I’ve simply acquired a sense of how le Carre works, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

It’s the story of Alec Leamus, the head of station in Berlin prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall. As the wall goes up he sees all of his agents being killed one by one; as the book begins the last one is shot dead just a few yards shy of Checkpoint Charlie. Alec is old, and tired, and there is no longer much of a station to be head of, and he returns to London in disgrace.

It seems that his networks were rolled up by the exertions of a German named Mundt, the head of the East German counter-espionage office. Leamus has come to hate Mundt, and when Control offers him the chance to bring about Mundt’s downfall he jumps at it. The remainder of the book details the operation.

The Kindle edition I read includes a forward by le Carre, in which he explains that he wrote Spy in just six weeks while employed at the British Embassy in Bonn. It was inspired by the rise of the Wall, and by le Carre’s own bitterness and loneliness, and so it is a bleak novel of betrayal and pain…but also deeply fascinating.

If you’ve not read le Carre, and are at all interested in espionage and spy fiction, this strikes me as an excellent book to begin with.

Up Jim River is the sequel to Michael Flynn’s The January Dancer, which I reviewed a few days ago.

It has a somewhat different feel to it than its predecessor. The January Dancer is told primarily in retrospect: a bard finds a scarred old man in the Bar on Jehovah, and wangles a story out of him about the Twisting Stone. The tale alternates between the bard and the old man and the main matter of the story; and the main matter of the story covers a lot of ground. One of the neat things about the book is the structure: the old man insists on telling the story in his own way, and that way isn’t entirely linear.

Up Jim River picks up where The January Dancer leaves off. One of the principles of the earlier tale, a Hound of the Ardry named Bridget ban, has disappeared, and the bard dragoons the old man to help her go searching. Indeed, the bard is Bridget ban’s daughter, and entire “modern” part of the previous book was simply part of the bard’s search. As a result, Up Jim River is much more linear than its predecessor, and seems to move at a more deliberate pace.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly. As I said in my earlier review, the Spiral Arm of Flynn’s imagining is an interesting place, and we get to see much more of it. Some of the old characters return, and it’s interesting to see them “for real” rather than through the old man’s eyes; and there are a number of intriguing new characters as well. And though this is the second book in a longer work, it isn’t simply advancing the global story arc; it has a definite beginning and end of its own.

The third volume in the series is called In the Lion’s Mouth, which has just recently been released; I intend to read it as soon as the e-book price has come down some.

There are a number of authors best known for writing fiction whose non-fiction I generally prefer. Mark Twain is first among them; I’m afraid I’d much rather read Life on the Missippi than Huckleberry Finn. And as it happens, Mike Flynn is another. In the Country of the Blind left me cold; there’s much to like about Eifelheim, but I don’t love it the way many people seem to; but what I really enjoy are his blog posts, which are intelligent, witty, and informative. In fact, I enjoy his blog so much that I truly feel a little bad about not enjoying his books more. It’s like admiring Richard Feynman for his bongo playing.

Consequently, I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed his recent space opera The January Dancer quite a lot. It takes place in the far future, in the other spiral arm of our galaxy. The action of the book concerns a search by numerous folks for a Maguffin called the Dancer, a red brick-like object that has the tendency to change its shape when you’re not looking. Both the action and the characters are interesting and memorable; but what I really enjoyed was the back story: what does this far-future milieu look like, and how did it get to be the way that it is?

Flynn has created a world in which engineering is simply a tool, and science is only a memory. The basic technologies of daily life (including space flight) are retained and passed down from generation to generation, but no new research is done. The people of the Spiral Arm, all of them human, are there because of an event remembers as the Great Cleansing, when the settlers of Dao Chetty (Tau Ceti?) forcibly removed the people of Earth and possibly other nearby systems from their homes and sent them in colony ships across the Rift. The ships were ethnically mixed in an attempt to destroy all Old Earth ethnicities. In the course of time, Earth itself was resettled by those with little memory of the cultures that had once lived there.

Earth is remembered primarily by the “Terrans,” an underclass who try to remember the lost cultures of Earth, and hope one day to free Earth from the sway of the Old Confederacy based on Dao Chetty. There are Terrans on most worlds; and among themselves they speak an odd and beautifully imagined patois drawn from a dozen Old Earth languages. One of the main characters, the Fudir, is a Terran, and much I enjoyed reading about him.

But this is all background, and I don’t want to tell you much about the plot or the characters. Better you should discover them on your own.