The Honourable Schoolboy
by John le Carre
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Book Summary Information
Author: John le CarreEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-11-01
ISBN: 0743457919
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of The Honourable Schoolboy
Book Review: The Good Guys Don't Win
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Honourable Schoolboy" is the middle book in British spymeister John LeCarre's great Smiley-Karla trilogy. As such, it suffers one of the great problems of middle children everywhere; it's frequently ignored, compared to its two famous, highly-lauded, successfully made into British Broadcasting Company television series bookends, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," and "Smiley's People." The supposed explanation of this oversight: this book's setting, Hong Kong, is too expensive a place to film.
To begin with the book at hand, Jerry Westerby, spy-journalist whom we've met before, is the 'honourable schoolboy' of this title. It also brings back some of our favorite characters in LeCarre's fictional British spy organization, known as "the circus." Smiley, of course, Peter Guillam, Sam Collins, Oliver Lacon, Saul Enderby, Tobey Esterhase, Connie Sachs, and "Doc" Di Salis. Also Tufty Thesiger, who ran the spy shop in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, as it was then. Through no fault of his own, he's been blown by Bill Haydon, the mole, or Russia's spy inside the London organization, whom Smiley exposed in "Tinker." Therefore, Thesiger must leave the colony, and the Brits close up shop there. But Smiley soon gets a sniff of something interesting happening in H.K., and sends Westerby, an Asian specialist, out.
So far, so good, and, as ever, LeCarre's spycraft and wit can't be faulted. He has, once again, given Westerby a father resembling his own, one of his trickster fathers: made a great success in the newspaper business, and then lost every penny: as ever, this material resonates. And the author has certainly come up with one of his complex and gripping plots.
However, some pretty high-brow critics have noticed that as LeCarre wrote more, he got more talky, and the speech of his characters got more mannered. This book, at 532 pages, is certainly a good illustration of that. Rather than opening with one of the author's great setpieces, as so many of his books do, it opens with a discussion of people talking about talking, that is, "there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin," and who was entitled to tell it, and how. Later, LeCarre mentions the 'Belgravia Cockney,'or upper-class imitation of lower class speech, in which it pleases his high-born characters to talk. He further mentions that, "in the old days, when the circus had a natural noncommissioned class, Jerry would have counted on some amiable small talk. No longer." LeCarre's a bit of a snob, you see, and he hates to see his kind of people lose control of the organization's chat. Be that as it may, chat everybody does, and not until literally half-way through this long book, with "Part III, Shaking the Tree,"does the talking actually stop and the action start. It's riveting from there on in, heading straight to another of the author's engrossing setpiece closings, but not everyone will read 260 pages before getting to the action.
Something else that probably impacts the book's popularity is, it's a downer. The secret services of Britain and the United States are shown to be populated almost entirely by self-interested careerists. The book's quite nihilistic, in fact: the bad guys win. Smiley, whom the author quotes as having once said the choices in intelligence work come down to "to be inhuman in defence of our humanity," or "harsh in our defence of compassion," allows himself to become so wrapped up in the Dolphin case that he fails to notice the murky bureaucratic infighting around him. He will pay dearly for his distraction.
Near the end of this book,the most important Chinese characters tells Westerby, the honourable schoolboy, " A political settlement, Mr. Westerby? With your people? I made many political settlements with them. They told me God loved children. Did you ever notice God love an Asian child, Mr. Westerby? They told me God was a 'kwailo,' (a westerner) and his mother had yellow hair. They told me God was a peaceful man, but I read once that there had never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ." This angry speech is one no lesser writer could pull off, and evidently reflects a lot of its author's own feelings. It foreshadows his post-cold war works, in which he will show himself to have a great concern for 'the brown babies,' as Ingrid Bergman's character so memorably put it in the movie of Agatha Christie's "Orient Express." Never mind, John LeCarre may sometimes take too long to say it, but at least the man's got a lot on his mind.
Summary of The Honourable Schoolboy
John le Carre'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 this classic masterwork, le Carre expands upon his extraordinary vision of a secret world as George Smiley goes on the attack.
In the wake of a demoralizing infiltration by a Soviet double agent, Smiley has been made ringmaster of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service). Determined to restore the organization's health and reputation, and bent on revenge, Smiley thrusts his own handpicked operative into action. Jerry Westerby, "The Honourable Schoolboy," is dispatched to the Far East. A burial ground of French, British, and American colonial cultures, the region is a fabled testing ground of patriotic allegiances?and a new showdown is about to begin.
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