ACTING: ANOTHER CLUE TO LE CARRE

If the writer who calls himself John le Carre were not so gainfully employed turning out the finest and most thoughtful espionage fiction of his time, he could make his way as an actor.

Le Carre, or David Cornwell as he was or is, a sometime British intelligence worker, has now read abridgements of his early novel “Call for the Dead” (Listen for Pleasure, two cassettes), which first introduced George Smiley, and his most recent novel “A Perfect Spy” (Listen for Pleasure, four cassettes).

Even Sir Alec Guinness, who after “Smiley’s People” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” will remain Smiley forever in the popular imagination, I suspect, could not improve on Le Carre/Cornwell’s delivery of these two superb books.

Le Carre is the impeccable narrative voice, cool, soft, detached but not indifferent, conveying the sensibilities of Smiley in the earlier work and those of Magnus Pym, the perfect if perfectly ambiguous spy of the later work, who has holed up in a provincial boarding house to review his eventful life and commit some of it to paper.

But Le Carre is also a numerous but subtle range of voices, so nicely distinct that the listener has no momentary uncertainties as to who is speaking, or whose feelings are being expressed.

In “Call for the Dead,” he is Smiley, already world-weary. He is also the thin, clipped, weary voice of the higher grades at the ministry, and the angry German widow of an agent who has committed suicide, a helpful Scotland Yard man, a cheerful volunteer at a community theater and diverse villains and scene-swellers. It is a tour de force performance, but a quiet one that never seeks to draw undue attention to itself.

“A Perfect Spy” contains, not least, a portrait of Magnus Pym’s extravagant, promoter/con man father that evidently bears some resemblance to Le Carre’s own father, who, according to an interview Le Carre gave several years ago, went briefly to prison for fraud and so overspent his winnings that the family lived like “millionaire paupers.”

But Le Carre, like the Pym character, had the best of educations (tuition not always paid promptly), the hand-tailoring that makes for the perfect Englishman. The autobiographical traces, if such indeed they are, give “A Perfect Spy” even deeper resonances than Le Carre’s earlier books.

Both of the abridgements, obviously approved by Le Carre, are by Sue Dawson. They manage the difficult feat, in limited listening time (two hours for “Call for the Dead,” 5 1/2 hours for “A Perfect Spy”), of presenting Le Carre’s wondrously convoluted plots, but also of preserving the texture of lives and the atmosphere of espionage as an occupation. The present is vividly seen, but we share as well the re-examinations of the past in which fateful loyalties were formed and fateful, irrevocable decisions taken.

Le Carre has caught better than anyone else a sense of the realities of a profession in which paranoia is a steady state and personal relationships are as fragile as dry leaves. The spies might come in from the cold, but there is no exit. Le Carre’s tellings have surprising emotional effect.

The argument between those who insist on unabridged texts and those who are happy with condensed versions goes on, inconclusively. I am lately finishing the unabridged reading of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” by the same Walter Zimmerman who did “Moby Dick” for the same distributor, Books on Tape in Newport Beach. This one, relatively, is a breeze: only nine cassettes or roughly 13 hours.

Emma’s inexorable progress toward tragedy is engrossing and dismaying to hear, and Flaubert’s insights into the soul of a woman stifled in place but liberated to her doom sounds decades ahead of its time. The piling on of detail is a course in 19th-Century French history. Perfect for pre-Christmas traffic with its frequent delays; Flaubert makes them tolerable, and I would not miss a word.

Yet Richard Crenna’s expert and multi-accented reading of Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October” (Newman Books on Cassette, two cassettes) seems, at less than three hours, just right. It is a novel of ingenious plot, and the swift and suspenseful plot is what you get.