Left Coast Justin's Reviews > The Honorable Schoolboy

I've never felt the need to apologize for preferring Le Carre's more recent novels to his cold war classics; The Honorable Schoolboy is the best of both worlds, and cements my belief that he was at his best when exploring the world beyond Moscow.

In an earlier discussion, I once mentioned that Le Carre writes two plots: Good guy gets crushed, and good guy barely avoids getting crushed. This is usually not resolved until the final few pages, and this book is no exception. But does anybody read him for the plots? I should think not. I read him in order to meet and really get to know new people, people who generally live much more interesting lives than the office managers, software developers and grocery clerks who make up my everyday social circle.

The enigmatic, outwardly calm but inwardly stressed legend George Smiley is in the driver's seat of an espionage operation involving a wealthy Hong Kong businessman and his shadowy relations to mainland China. Flavor is added by setting the story in the waning days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War (or, as they prefer to call it, the American war). A new character, Jerry Westerby, for reasons of his own, is not fully sold on the goals of the operation, and further complexity arises from the Americans' attempts to intervene. At the time the book was written, Hong Kong was still a British territory and so Smiley has some leverage to stave the Americans off.

All of this leads to plenty of palace intrigues in London and Washington, D.C., a struggle that is conveyed with impressive insight and understanding. But the heart of this book is really the bar of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, realistically located fourteen floors up in a Hong Kong highrise, fourteen floors above the "mud-brown sweat of building dust and smuts from the chimney stacks of Kowloon." This is where Jerry Westerby, putative journalist and actual spy, hangs out with his fellows, the vividly-described Craw, Rocker, California Luke and the Dwarf.

A common complaint against Le Carre is that he writes women poorly, which I agree with -- to an extent. I would argue that he has little interest in people who don't lead double lives, male or female, and reserves his awesome descriptive powers for people who are hiding something. Which, in this book, encompasses nearly everyone we meet, with the notable exception of the beautiful blonde Brit Elizabeth (though her parents, in a short scene painful to read, are well-rendered).

I don't think I've ever read a truly convincing description of Hong Kong, though Le Carre does as well as anybody else. To be fair, his focus is on the more rarified top-of-the-hill British section, which I have never visited. But the infernal heat and humidity, the mildew-blackened concrete highrises are still there, just as he described them. Another of the pleasures of this book (for me) is that a lot of it took place on boats, a place where we have not yet ventured in Smiley's books.

This book is a really enjoyable escape from reality for several hours. It's Le Carre's first attempt to expand his world beyond Eastern vs. Western Europe, a direction that comes into full bloom later in his career, and which provides his best writing. In my opinion, this is the best of the seven or eight books in which George Smiley plays a role.