Customer Reviews

The Call-Girls

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As an academic novel, Koestler's Call Girls has relatively little to recommend it, perhaps in part because it cuts so close the bone. Reading Koester's description of a small conference of academic "call girls" is all too similar to the real thing. The pompous posturing and politicking of such a group is every bit as tedious on the printed page as it is in person. If one is looking for an enjoyable academic satire, try David Lodge's Changing Places or Small World, try Richard Russo's Straight Man, or even try Jane Smiley's Moo; for a somewhat more serious expose, try Carl Djerassi's Cantor's Dilemma.

Not that I wish to dismiss this work entirely; Koestler's novel is far more successful as a bleak commentary on the direction of the human race, mostly due to the two brilliant short pieces which frame the centeral academic tale. These pieces remaing brilliant and haunting despite the dry centerpiece.

The Call-Girls is a novel evidently intended as a "popularization" -- since people like to read novels! -- of ideas that Koestler covered more exhaustively in his book-length essays, in particular The Ghost in the Machine and Janus: A Summing Up. The fictional structure is really little more than a skeletal frame into which Koestler has dumped (sometimes verbatim) arguments that he formulated elsewhere: A dozen "quirky" professor-types (one giggles, one blushes, one's outspoken and gay, one does ten things at once, etc.) -- the jetsetting symposia-attending call-girls of the title -- come together in Switzerland to discuss how mankind is to be saved from itself. So that's what they do. As story, this is less than gripping; and either of the abovementioned nonfiction titles will serve as a better introduction to Koestler's ideas, which ARE gripping.

I enjoyed the book immensely. A "tragi-comedy" about a group of pretensious experts attempting to offer their own ideas of improving humanity's condition, all while falling victim to the all-too-human impulses they are trying to remedy. Here are the liner notes:

Call Girls is a funny yet frightening view of mankind's chance for survival. At a Swiss alpine village gather the "call girls"- distinguished scientists, philosophers, and sociologists who spend much of their professional lives flying from one international symposium to another. They're here to discuss "Approaches To Survival", and their task is to analyze the causes of man's predicament, diagnose his condition, and explore possible remedies. During the one-week symposium they present papers embodying many current theories of man- as an aggressor, a set of mechanical responses, a reservoir of psychic powers- and ironically, their own jealousies, suspicions, and aggressions reveal them as a microcosm of the very problems they are trying to solve.

Koestler, best known for "Darkness at Noon", left us a satire of modern academe easily on a par with "White Noise". The book revolves around the smarmy and cynical personalities of several distinguished academics who are attending a conference, and offers readers a novel of ideas which asks disturbing questions about the relationship of intellectuals to society.