The Honourable Schoolboy

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Neither the most popular nor the best known of the Smiley books, Call for the Dead is frequently denigrated (along with A Murder of Quality) as more mystery than spy novel. As a writer of crime fiction and a lover of origins stories, it is precisely my cup of tea. 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. The Honourable Schoolboy lends itself with particular ease to such a journalistic reading due to the place and time it is set in: a very large part of the novel takes place in Hong Kong and South-East Asia during the retreat of the United States from Vietnam and a lot of room is given to highly atmospheric descriptions of the situation, of the feelings of uncertainty, unrest and frustration pervading the area during that period – making this by far the longest book of Le Carré’s so far. Even though Le Carré’s account is fictional, he appears to have done an impressive amount of research for it, and I doubt any journalistic, presumably non-fictional report could do a better job at painting a picture that is both authentic and immersive. Also unlike Bond, Smiley is the star of several smart, well-written novels. Rare among thrillers, the Smiley books — there are nine of them, including A Legacy of Spies — score highly in both the qualities that people pretend to like in books (formal style, psychological portraiture, political intelligence, moral sensibility) and the qualities that people actually like in books (sex, violence, plot twists, convincing and frequently deployed spy jargon). Collectively, they form the best espionage series ever written. Spying/Terrorism Thriller - Yes Cloak & Dagger Plotlets: - stopping a saboteur/spy Kid or adult book? - Adult or Young Adult Book

Recalled in 1943, he marries - to general astonishment - the beautiful but eternally unfaithful Lady Ann Sercomb. 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.The "schoolboy" of the title, Jerry Westerby, second son of the press baron Lord Westerby, a failed novelist as Smiley is a failed priest, several times married and a guilty father, ex-agent prepared to do his duty -- "You point me and The height of the Cold War. It is 1962, only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas, a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer, finds his network in East Berlin is in complete tatters. All his agents are either on the run or dead, victims of the ruthlessly efficient East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt. Leamas is recalled to London. Honourable is gorgeously written, with passages that range from lyrical to brooding, snarling to contemplative. I've been noting and reading aloud bits from throughout the novel:

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 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. This novel is worth following up with the nonfiction juggernaut, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?laundered and pouring into Hong Kong. Surely this is the work of Karla, the super spymaster of Moscow Centre. But what is he buying? A complete masterpiece and my favourite in the series to far. It is also the first of the Karla Trilogy. A joy from start to finish. John le Carré's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

In the second part of John le Carré's Karla Trilogy, the battle of wits between Smiley and his Soviet adversary takes on an even more dangerous dimension.Therefore, one might consider The Honourable Schoolboy worth reading on those merits alone. But Le Carré’s ambition for this and his other novels does not extend to merely being reportage, this novel, like his previous ones, aims for something more, and I think that it is this which makes them stand out. And this is not just true for the novels’ content but for their form, too – quite often, the apparently realistic exterior of Le Carré’s spy novels conceals inner mechanisms that do not run by the same rules governing realistic narratives but are structurally quite experimental. The Honourable Schoolboy is another example of this – its main thematic concern is with truth and its uses, and the novel’s forms reflects this, even if it is by adding its own distortions in the process.