The Honourable Schoolboy

The Honourable Schoolboy is the second installment of the trilogy that tells of the struggle between George Smiley, British spy extraordinaire, and Karla, his Russian counterpart. The story picks up more or less where Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy left off. We see George and his helpers digging through the files trying to find evidence of cases that the traitor from the first book may have squelched. The theory is that if they can find something he wanted hidden, there might be something well worth uncovering. Needless to say, they find just such an instance and it turns out to have huge potential for providing intelligence on Communist China. I won't reveal any more of the plot because novels like this depend too much on the specific twists and turns for their entertainment value. The first thing that struck me about this novel is the incredibly odd narrative voice. It is most distinct for roughly the first 100 pages and then is toned down. It's as if there was a bar where low level spies hung out and gossiped about this case. The bartender overhead little snippets of their conversations and then narrated this book. It makes it very difficult for the story to get any real traction in the beginning and for my money this could have been tightened up considerably. The main stars of The Honourable Schoolboy are George Smiley and Jerry Westerby. Westerby had a small part in Tinker, Tailor but he is the main field agent here and his dogged determination to keep moving forward permeates the story just as much as George's quiet brilliance. The tension definitely builds to an almost fevered pitch as the story approaches its conclusion and readers are left guessing what will happen and who is really aligned with whom. Unfortunately, I found that it all fell apart at the ending. I won't give away the specifics but the actions of Westerby were really a stretch and not at all in keeping with someone with his experience. I also found it incredibly unlikely that British ministers would conspire with Americans against their own agency with the hope that Uncles Sam would be grateful when they could have had a huge source of intelligence for themselves... a hard asset that would provide trade material for years. It just felt like Le Carre' had decided that he needed to deliver the message that government is bad, the good guys never win, and that nothing good comes from spy games. All in all, I do recommend this book. It's a bit slow at the start and the ending is really tough to swallow. But it's a complex plot, beautifully unraveled and well worth the journey. I also found some of the interview scenes spellbinding as the author gives such humanity and individuality to characters that only appear in one scene.

"The Honourable Schoolboy" is the second book in the British author John LeCarre's engrossing Smiley-Karla trilogy. It shares several qualities with "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," the first; and "Smiley's People," the third: Le Carre's deep knowledge of spycraft, as a former spy himself; his ability to create tight, complex plots, flavorful characters, and his way with a word. Yet the middle book has never been as popular as the other two, and has never been filmed. Be that as it may, Jerry Westerby, hack journalist, has-been spy, is the "honourable schoolboy" of this title. Like many of Le Carre's male characters, he's been given a father resembling the author's own: a charismatic confidence man who first tasted great success in the newspaper business, then managed to blow it all by his death. George Smiley, on the strength of his triumph in unmasking a mole-- a term LeCarre created, meaning a spy put into an organization long before he is called upon to go to work-- has been appointed chief of the British secret service agency LeCarre is pleased to call the circus. We again meet most of our favorite circus characters from the earlier book: Peter Guillam, Sam Collins, Oliver Lacon, Saul Enderby, Toby Esterhase, Connie Sachs, and "Doc" Di Salis. The chief of the Russian secret service, Smiley's greatest enemy, Karla, also figures in this novel. Karla's mole in the circus, whom Smiley triumphantly exposed in "Tinker," has done that organization great harm, wiping out its spy networks, seeing to the firing of Smiley and his loyal friends, transmitting quantities of bad information-- called disinformation-- to the circus, that then transmitted it to the American secret service, called "the cousins," by LeCarre's people. At the opening of "Schoolboy," Tufty Thesiger, chief spy in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, as it was then considered, though blameless himself, must be removed from H.K., and his entire apparatus shut down, as the mole has blown it all. So the Brits close up shop on that fantastically crowded, expensive little island. Until Smiley gets a whiff of something important going down, and sends Westerby, an Asian specialist, out. One probable reason this book is less popular than its companions is its wordiness: it weighs in at 562 pages, and the action doesn't really start until you are literally half-way through, at page 268. It's mesmerizing from there, leading to one of the author's mightiest final setpieces, but you could tell a pretty good little story in 268 pages. The book's also a downer, harshly exposing LeCarre's nihilistic, nonglamourous view of the spy world: the secret services are shown to be riddled with careerists only interested in themselves; and they win the day. The better characters, such as they are, lose all. No happy endings here. No wonder it's not the most popular of LeCarre's books. But if you value his work, and what he can -- and does deliver-- you might want to give it a second shot.

I read this novel for the second time recently and having the purpose and plot of the novel clear in my mind all the extra dimensions in the novel immediately revealed themselves. I previously saw Jerry Westerby as sympathetic but slightly pompous and contrastd with Smiley my opinion of him wasn't especially high (unlike other charactrs like Alec Leamas and Smiley himself) but then again contrasted with Smiley not many people really stand out. However, Le Carrè gets the balance right in this novel. The balance between writing his characters out so well yet keeping the plot going at a good pace. Th Circus is a "sinking ship" wih Smiley as it captain. Like a father, Smiley has to pick up the pieces of his broken children and put them back together. Apart from the worry of rejuvenating the Circus, Smiley must also deal with his own past and with his own personal loves and hates including his unfaithful wife. As such Smiley by day spends his time purging the Circus of the evils with which it has been infected by the mole (who was unmasked in the previous novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and by night takes long walks in a bid to purge his own devils. These apart, Smiley must also battle the Whitehall barons and control a great operation in the Far East in order to capture two great Russian spies who are also brothers, an operation headed by Jerry Westerby. And what a character Westerby is, I realised on my second reading. Le Carrè describes his loneliness and the purpose behind his vices so well yet in such short bursts, we feel we are in the shoes of Jerry. And despite knowing that some of his actions are wrong, we still will him to go on and feel that we would do the same were we in his place. The backdrop is described better than any novel I have read about the region. Simply using this period and hopping around from war-torn city to war-torn city, Le Carrè encompasses al the futilities of war without once morally judging them and speaks about sacrifice which is a major theme. A newspaper (the name of which escapes me) described The Honourable Schoolboy as "simply on of the finest novels of the seventies" which is a fitting subtitle to the novel as it encompasses it and describes it all well.Another issue which Le Carrè brings to the forefront painfully well is that of the moral ambiguities of life and of the spy profession. At the end of the novel, just before the prologue chapter, all of hiscomes into contex in the last few sentences of the chapter. Westerby, Ko, Lizzie, Smiley, Luke all come into context as we imagine the scene moving in almost slow motion. It is very hard to decide but I feel that of all the Le Carrè novels I have read, this is probably my favourite. If you read it, you would know why.

The Honourable Schoolboy is the fifth Le Carre novel featuring the enigmatic George Smiley. After unmasking the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Smiley is put in charge of the Circus, a position he should have had years ago based on merit. It appears that Smiley is one of many who were put out to pasture by Bill Haydon's nefarious activities over the previous years. Smiley, starting with his closest circle, must work backwards ruthlessly discarding people with questionable loyalty or little competence and finding others like himself who were purged by Haydon. In the process he finds Jerry Westerby living quietly in Italy. Westerby is resurrected and sent to Hong Kong to foil Smiley's arch-nemesis Karla. The result is an epic tour de force with Westerby's journeys throughout South East Asia presenting a fascinating counterpoint to Smiley's group working inside the Circus. The Honourable Schoolboy contains a cast of fascinating characters. Smiley himself is the classic anti James Bond. He is middle-aged, plump and bespectacled. Unlike Bond he is not a ladies' man. In fact, his wife is serially unfaithful to him. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy his wife's infidelities were used by Karla to undermine him. Smiley has sacrificed whatever he had of a marriage to remove his vulnerability. Westerby is a stark contrast to Smiley; tall, athletic and a womanizer. In contrast to Smiley he lets his own torn emotions affect the way he does his work. There are also large assortments of supporting characters who are naive or scheming. It also features two of the most vicious characters ever employed in novels; Fawn and Tiu. Le Carre rarely showing any of their direct handiwork accentuates their viciousness.The novel has Le Carre's usual themes; betrayal, misdirected love and the use of an opponent's human vulnerability against him. The betrayals in The Honourable Schoolboy towards the end are perhaps the most multi-layered and intense of any Le Carre novel. If the reader wants a James Bond type ending with Bond having killed the enemy and gotten the girl, The Honourable Schoolboy should be skipped. Le Carre's novels are of "the no good deed goes unpunished school". However, he is extremely adept at revealing the story details much like peeling the layers of an onion. His characters whether good or evil, most being somewhere in between, are fascinating and believable. The insider's knowledge of espionage shines through as always. The Honourable Schoolboy also contrasts the East with the West. The fall of Cambodia and Vietnam are especially poignant backdrops to the story.Perhaps it is difficult to understand in this day what the cold war environment was like. It's instructive to read a novel like The Honourable Schoolboy that was written a quarter of a century ago to understand. The novel contains a lot and probably requires several readings to thoroughly appreciate all the nuances. However, based on the first reading The Honourab

John Le Carre's mistakes (e.g., "Naive and Sentimental Lover") are more interesting than most other writers' crowning achievements, but "Schoolboy" is as good an intrigue and adventure novel as one will ever find. Le Carre is the bravest popular novelist around. He panders to no one's politics; he doesn't care how much work a reader might normally choose to invest in a book; and he adheres to no formulae. You either trust him utterly, and let him take you where he's going, or you read Grisham."Schoolboy" features a Le Carre regular character, George Smiley, and centers on a bit character from earlier work, Jerry Westerby. In a sense, the novel is a contrast between, on the one hand, the bluff, hearty, athletic, noble, and, well, superficially superficial Westerby; and on the other, the deepest and most complicated character in the genre, George Smiley. But there's so much more here: the contrast between Eastern and Western cultures; between England in its late-twentieth century posture and the then-seeming decline in influence of the U.S.; between the young Turks at the Circus and its old guard.What unites it all is Le Carre's remarkable gift at storytelling, dialogue, and character development. I read many authors in the intrigue, mystery, and crime fields. But they're all just faint echoes of Le Carre. If you want real gold, and not just cheap imitation, he's your man.