The Honourable Schoolboy

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Recalled in 1943, he marries - to general astonishment - the beautiful but eternally unfaithful Lady Ann Sercomb. The descriptive parts of the book were also excellent. In his introductory piece, John Le Carrè writes that he spent some months in China researching for this book. He traveled around with a group of journalists and also spent time getting to know the hang-outs for many different classes of people. His research is woven so smoothly into this novel that I felt like I was there myself. This is what great writers can achieve: carry us along on a journey we might never be able to take in real life, but create it so well and with such detail that we live it, too. A public school in the early 1960s. When the wife of one of the masters is found bludgeoned to death, Smiley, out of loyalty to an old friend, finds himself investigating her death - an investigation that lifts the lid on a world of hidden passions and murderous hatreds. I'm a longtime reader of the espionage genre --beginning as just a lad--and although I massively enjoyed all of John LeCarre's earlier works and particularly his George Smiley series--I must call out "The Honourable Schoolboy" for especial recognition.

One affecting scene has the book's lead agent, Jerry Westerby (the title is his code name), confronting an American spy right after the fall of Saigon. The somewhat terrifying, utterly depressed American demands that the Brit shake his hand: This follows pretty much straight on after Tinker, Tailor... Smiley is trying to re-build the Circus after the gross betrayal of the previous book and uncovers a money trail to Hong Kong. He recruits Jerry Westerby, an 'occasional' spy to go out to investigate not expecting Jerry's own romantic 'schoolboy' values to be his nemesis.There is something almost ceremonial about starting a new le Carré: the expectation, not knowing where we’ll be taken but trusting that wherever it is will be both terrible and magnificent; the reassurance that the story will be entirely original, and yet the author’s voice comfortingly familiar. 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 of life in terms of conspiracy.

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. Overall ' The Honourable Schoolboy' is a slight disappointment after the wonderful ' Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. It felt incredibly long, overlong, and full of unnecessary detail, although there is also much to enjoy too.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. 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.