The Honourable Schoolboy

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philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas, of course, really they're nowhere." Of George Smiley, failed priest, lonesome man, it is said: "One day, one of two things will happen to George. He'll I first encountered my mother’s copy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the house as a teenager, but I didn’t read the book until I was an adult. Le Carré’s generation of espionage writers perfected the classic third-person point of view that I and many other spy authors use to this day. Tinker Tailor weaves a tense and grim cold war tale of betrayal among men. It features few female characters, and most romantic storylines have a grimness of their own. Both TV and film adaptations open and close with the gripping, labyrinthine plot. One more point: 'Schoolboy' is great because of the timeperiod in which LeCarre wrote. Who else was better positioned than LeCarre, to describe the fading rays of English colonialism? Who else there to witness the long decline and fall? Who else to sum up the whole postwar epoch? Who else to deliver both bureaucracy & diplomacy to lay readers? Who else to delineate the new era of geo-maneuvering? Only LeCarre can craft a tale with a fine-grained cross-section of such grand themes, events, & personalities all at once. From the highest corridors of political power, down to the dullest middle-class drudges of London's suburbs, down to the meanest, alley-scrabbling police informant, he roves his eye.

Published in 1977, The Honourable Schoolboy feels different from its predecessors; this isn't a criticism. My only quibble was that I He had done everything they had asked for: gotten them all the intelligence on the upcoming hand-off. Smiley rightly saw though, that Westerby was unraveling. He was too attached to Lizzie; he was in danger of upsetting the transfer somehow. While the Americans are adding another five metres of concrete to the Embassy roof, and the soldiers are crouching in capes under their trees, and the journalists are drinking whisky, and the generals are at the opium houses, the Khmer Rouge will come out of the jungle and cut our throats. (346)Recruited into the "Circus" in the late 1920s, when he might so easily have become an Oxford don, George Smiley spends the 1930s and early 1940s working undercover in Nazi Germany in daily fear of betrayal and death. The scene when Westerby visits Tiny Ricardo in Thailand is my favorite because not only is one of the main mysteries of the novel solved, but the reader can see Westerby's own doubts about the value and importance of the intelligence work he is performing at the cost of others' and his own humanity. These doubts then go on to motivate Westerby's actions and decisions in the last section of the novel. Smiley is only a side character in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the story of an embittered double agent sent to infiltrate East German intelligence, but you should start here anyway, because this book is so freaking good and also because it’s the clearest and most direct articulation of the questions that animate le Carré’s work — stuff like What if Western democracy is a self-deceivingly immoral enterprise, devoid of values and rotting from the inside? What if communism … isn’t? What if spying is, instead of sexy and fun and heroic, awful and degrading and really bad for your liver? That a book that can engagingly ask those kinds of bad-dinner-party questions and be as gripping and unforgettable as The Spy Who is a testament to le Carré’s mastery of plot and pacing.

Smiley again] To be inhuman in defense of our humanity, he had said, harsh in defense of compassion. To be single-minded in defense of our disparity. (460) Part 1 of the Karla Trilogy. George Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. "Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary." Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journey into his past - a past filled with love, duplicity and betrayal. There are large passages of inaction throughout. This device serves two functions - one, it exacerbates the impact of the action - and two, it gives time and space for the author to describe in incredible depth every character in the book. It is a masterful exercise in the writing of people. The ending, which had a sad inevitability about it (not in terms of disappointment but in the way the world turns) is almost inconsequential due to the sadness you feel in just not having these characters around any more. It would not matter so much if the myth-mongering were confined to the minor characters. But in this novel George Smiley completes his rise to legendary status. Smiley has been present, on the sidelines or at the center, but more often at the center, in most of le Carré’s novels since the very beginning. In Britain he has been called the most representative character in modern fiction. In the sense that he has been inflating almost as fast as the currency, perhaps he is. His latest appearance should make it clear to all but the most dewy-eyed that Smiley is essentially a dream. Jerry Westerby] had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, or that his own class was to blame for the mess. (449)

Lunch,’ Martindale announced without much optimism. They ate it upstairs, glumly, off plastic catering trays delivered by van. The partitions were too low and Guillam's custard flowed into his meat. Treats the reader as sharp witted and bright enough to keep up. It is magnificent. Beautifully and economically written, and dealing in politics, intrigue and what it is to be human. A bold claim, but all life is here. It’s dark, very dark, but quite brilliant too. The Honourable Schoolboy brings the second sequence to a heavy apotheosis. A few brave reviewers have expressed doubts about whether some of the elements which supposedly enrich le Carré’s later manner might not really be a kind of impoverishment, but generally the book has been covered with praise—a response not entirely to be despised, since The Honourable Schoolboy is so big that it takes real effort to cover it with anything. At one stage I tried to cover it with a pillow, but there it was, still half visible, insisting, against all the odds posed by its coagulated style, on being read to the last sentence. In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably”

wasn't entirely convinced about the motivation for the protagonist's course of action in the final chapters. Around 1974 or so, John le Carré had traveled in the company of a journalist throughout Southeast Asia and Hong Kong to capture the feel of the times. The place descriptions are strongly evocative. The speech of Westerby and his journalist colleagues are heavily peppered with the idioms of the decade. Excluding Smiley and his chosen, the characters in this international cast reflect the racist and sexist attitudes of their period (which probably still exists today albeit better masked). The main character is not George Smiley (although he is present in much of the novel) but Jerry Westerby, one of the Occasionals as they are referred to - foreign correspondents who do a little spying on the side. As such, it is altogether more human than either Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Smiley's People - the reader is engaged on an emotional level even though it is perhaps the most complex of the three books in terms of plot.

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.”

And the huggermugger is appropriately elaborate. To act is to betray, either the self or someone else, or the past or the idea of civilization. In Smiley's metaphysical scheme, Karla is the great red whale. According to Jerry, as to Ko, one honors killed him, he thought. Give or take a little, it was me who gave him the shove. "It's not just the generals, it's every man who carries a gun." Le Carré used to be famous for showing us the bleak, tawdry reality of the spy’s career. He still provides plenty of bleak tawdriness, but romanticism comes shining through. Jerry Westerby, it emerges, has that “watchfulness” which “the instinct” of “the very discerning” describes as “professional.” You would think that if Westerby really gave off these vibrations it would make him useless as a spy. But le Carré does not seem to notice that he is indulging himself in the same kind of transparently silly detail which Mark Twain found so abundant in Fenimore Cooper. The second volume in le Carre's fabled Karla spy trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy is a significant departure from the five Smiley books leading up to it. It's the longest of all the Smiley novels, and the only one where the action takes place outside of Europe.Part 3 of the Karla Trilogy. When a Russian émigré is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, Smiley is called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past. What follows is Smiley the human being at his most vulnerable and Smiley the case officer at his most brilliant; and it takes to a thrilling conclusion his career-long, serpentine battle with the enigmatic and ruthless Russian spymaster Karla Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.” He ultimately chose a kind of 'defector' story. So far so good. But to jazz it up he chooses a 'stringer' as the lead character (Westerby is a reporter, not a career spy). The books in the first category—and le Carré might still produce more of them, if he can only bring himself to distrust the kind of praise he has grown used to receiving—were written in the early and middle Sixties. They came out at the disreputably brisk rate of one a year. Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962), The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963), and The Looking Glass War (1965) were all tightly controlled efforts whose style, characterization, and atmospherics were subordinate to the plot, which was the true hero. Above all, they were brief: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is not even half the length of the ponderous whopper currently under review. Here are the bad things: I found the characters are rather flat, the plot and the war among spies slow paced and uninteresting. In the end I don't care what might happen to any of those characters. So it's a disappointed 2 stars.