{"id":5129,"date":"2023-01-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/?p=5129"},"modified":"2023-05-09T10:58:27","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T10:58:27","slug":"thomas-hinde-the-day-the-call-came","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/27\/thomas-hinde-the-day-the-call-came\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Hinde: The Day the Call Came"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thomas Hinde was the pen name of Sir Thomas Chitty, novelist for thirty years before ditching fiction for books on English country gardens and other pastoral pursuits. The Day the Call Came<\/em> (1964) was his seventh novel and, while I\u2019ve no idea if it\u2019s indicative of his oeuvre (they\u2019re mostly out of print), it was reissued in 2013 and, even over the last decade, has garnered scant appreciation. The eagle-eyed foreword by Ramsey Campbell discusses its impact on his own work and cites it within his own survey of \u201cgreat horror novels not usually regarded as such\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s more a thriller, with the escalating tension on a sunny suburban scale rather than the high danger espionage thrillers among its contemporaries a la Deighton and Le Carre. The narrator, Harry Bale, late thirties and married with two kids, is a seemingly normal chap who one day receives \u2018the call\u2019. It\u2019s no more than a note tucked in an envelope with the typed words \u2018STANDY BY\u2019, but it\u2019s all that\u2019s needed to activate him, as if he\u2019s some sleeper cell that has long awaited instructions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His mission however is unclear and Bale eyes the world around him, interpreting everything as possible instructions, finding meaning in potentially innocuous events. Where casual conversation is interpreted with heightened meaning and never at face value, we’re never quite sure of Bale\u2019s intentions when he tells us that he knew what he had to do. Living within Bale\u2019s head for the duration of the novel reveals a melting pot of conspiracy and suspicion delivered with surface-level sanity. While his explanations are obtuse and he tells us of how things were, we can never truly believe him, and, worse, never truly know what he\u2019s thinking even when he tells us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although not without humour, the dread that builds up over the course of the novel hangs on every page. As Bale recants conversations and voices suspicions we wonder if there\u2019s meat there or if his psychosis is besting his rationality. In this sunshine-soaked tale the light can\u2019t reach the darker parts of its paranoid mind and the mystery that creates is all the more interesting. It leaves us to make a call of our own: how to rationalise Bale and select the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Hinde was the pen name of Sir Thomas Chitty, novelist for thirty years before ditching fiction for books on English country gardens and other pastoral pursuits. The Day the Call Came (1964) was his seventh novel and, while I\u2019ve no idea if it\u2019s indicative of his oeuvre (they\u2019re mostly out of print), it was Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hinde-thomas"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/51t86mEiUSL-2.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pon-1kJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5131,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5129\/revisions\/5131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}