Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Honourable Schoolboy

The Smiley books are all outstanding and this one is no exception. What really impresses me is how the narration of each of them is completely different. The tone of Schoolboy is sort of a retrospective, written after the end of the story and looking back with an omniscient, unnamed narrator with a sense of humor and a daft talent for revealing details only as the story unfolds (with occasional teasers thrown in.) Rather than following the downfall of Smiley's wife's lover who took out the entire British secret service with him, we pick up the action as the survivors are picking up the pieces and eventually we make sense of the details we get from action taking place in Hong Kong. The pace picks up to a roar as the book draws us in and propels us to an explosive finish.

A nice setpiece about Smiley reading and thinking about his former boss, Control, who died in the course of the previous book:
"Smiley stared at an evening paper, not reading it. In a corner, not twelve feet from him, little Fawn had taken up the baby-sitter's classic position. His dark eyes smiled agreeably on the diners and on the doorway. He lifted his cup with his left hand, while his right idled close to his chest. Did Karla sit like this, Smiley wondered. Did Karla take refuge among the unsuspecting?

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."

Typical poetic description from Le Carré:
"...northern fringes of London that are like the superstructure of perma-
nently sinking ships. They lie at the end of long lawns where the flowers
are never quite in flower; the husbands man the lifeboats all in a flurry at
about eight-thirty in the morning, and the women and children spend
the day keeping afloat until their men-folk return too tired to sail any-
where. These buildings were built in the thirties and have stayed a grub
by white ever since. Their oblong, steel-framed windows look on to the
lush billows of the links, where women in eye-shades wander like lost
souls." (pp. 201)

I liked this one too:
"Last night there had been a storm, he remembered. Must have hit an hour before Luke telephoned. He had watched it from the mattress while the girl lay snoring along his leg. First the smell of vegetation, then the wind rustling guiltily in the palm trees, dry hands rubbed together. Then the hiss of rain like tons of molten shot being shaken into the sea. Finally the sheet lightning rocking the harbour in long slow breaths while salvos of thunder cracked over the dancing roof-tops.
killed him, he thought. Give or take a little, it was me who gave him the shove. "It's not just the generals, it's every man who carries a gun."
Quote source and context.
The phone was ringing." (pp. 286)

This is just fun - reminded me of Jake and Elroy 100 miles from Chicago with $5 and sunglasses:
"Jerry clambered after him and, having settled himself into the co-pilot's seat, silently totted up his blessings: We're about five hundred tons overweight. We're leaking oil. We're carrying an armed bodyguard. We're forbidden to take off. We're forbidden to land, and Phnom Penh airport's probably got a hole in it the size of Buckinghamshire. We have an hour and a half of Khmer Rouge between us and salvation, and if anybody turns sour on us at the other end, ace operator Westerby is caught with his knickers round his ankles and about two hundred gunny bags of opium base in his arms." (pp. 325)