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The Honourable Schoolboy

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But the really strength-sapping feature of the prose style is its legend-building tone. Half the time le Carré sounds like Tolkien. You get visions of Hobbits sitting around the fire telling tales of Middle Earth. 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 L]ittle ships, as Craw knew very well, cannot change course as easily as the winds that drive them. (192)

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. 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 George Smiley) - I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country's goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy (p. 588).” Elephantiasis, of ambition as well as reputation, set in during the late Sixties, when A Small Town in Germany (1968) inaugurated the second category. Not only was it more than merely entertaining, but it was, according to the New Stateman’s reviewer, “at least a masterpiece.” After an unpopular but instantly forgiven attempt at a straight novel ( The Naïve and Sentimental Lover), the all-conquering onward march of the more than merely entertaining spy story was resumed with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), which was routinely hailed as the best thriller le Carré had written up to that time.That said,there is no intrigue of the previous book. The twist of the tale never materialises. Too many characters are presented as caricatures of various stereotypes. The know-all Smiley himself never really crafts anything ingenious. And to top it all, the end is too incomplete even though realistic, one never knows whether Nelson, the chief villain, really mattered in the tiniest to Karla, China or the West. One is equally dark about the true nature of feelings between Jerry and Lizie, and if this was supposed to be the pinnacle of the retiring Smiley, it was simply too sad. Control had. Control had made a whole second, third, or fourth life for himself in a two-room upstairs flat, beside the Western bypass, under the plain name of Matthews, not filed with housekeepers as an alias. Well, "whole" life was an exaggeration. But he had kept clothes there, and a woman--Mrs. Matthews herself-_even a cat. And taken golf lessons at an artisans' club on Thursday mornings early, while from his desk in the Circus he poured scorn on the great unwashed, and on golf, and on love, and on any other piffling human pursuit which secretly might tempt him. He had even rented a garden allotment, Smiley remembered, down by a railway siding. Mrs. Matthews had insisted on driving Smiley to see it in her groomed Morris car on the day he broke the sad news to her. It was as big a mess as anyone else's allotment: standard roses, winter vegetables they hadn't used, a tool-shed crammed with hose-pipe and seed boxes." 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. You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.’ On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’s honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed?”

Beautifully written and expertly plotted, it also takes a razor sharp scalpel to snobbery and the British class system, and has a pleasingly authentic and complex psychological dimension. Smiley instructs Westerby to become more proactive in his investigations, forcing Drake to move forward with his plans to extract Nelson. Frost, the banker from whom Westerby had acquired Ko's identity, is brutally murdered; Westerby and his Hong Kong colleague Luke are shown the mutilated body. Westerby travels on his own in and out of war-torn Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand searching for Ricardo, who tries to kill him. On his return to Hong Kong, Westerby finds Luke murdered in his apartment. He becomes increasingly stressed and begins to romantically obsess over Lizzie. Westerby's actions cause Smiley to change his plans.

laundered and pouring into Hong Kong. Surely this is the work of Karla, the super spymaster of Moscow Centre. But what is he buying? That's in addition to laying a new cornerstone in British spy fiction. You may as well consider it the most fully-formed, most mature, & most robust espionage novel yet produced in English literature. For that's what it is. This is the lone title to judge all others by. Previously, that torch was held by Somerset Maugham, or Greene, or LeCarre himself. But now, only Len Deighton's ' Game, Set, Match,' series (a trilogy, mind you) can favorably compare in depth and breadth to just this one, extraordinary LeCarre masterpiece. 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) After Tinker, Tailor, le Carre's fans waited many years for the follow-up The Honourable Schoolboy. When I first read the book 35 (!) years ago I recall being a little disappointed that the book wasn't more Smiley-centric, but in retrospect le Carre's shift in focus from treachery within the Circus to the exotic East was what the series needed lest it choke on its own incestuous fog. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2009-07-22 20:30:46 Boxid IA101413 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon 5D City New York Containerid_2 X0008 Donor

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