Woman Reading (is away exploring)'s Reviews > The Honourable Schoolboy

4 ☆

In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you're worse than a spy.

The spy business is indeed rough and dirty. George Smiley successfully flushed out the longterm sleeper agent, the Russian mole, from the Secret Service (aka the Circus) in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He was then immediately tasked with rescuing the Circus from an ignominious demise and dealing with the growing mistrust from both Whitehall and the American "Cousins" (ie. the CIA). Fearing the corrosive reach of the mole, Smiley wielded not a scalpel but an axe. The Circus' staff is now one quarter of its "pre-fall" size and Smiley has admitted only 4 persons into his inner circle. Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis are old-hand analysts respectively in charge of intelligence for Russia and China, the two biggest Communist threats. After months of meticulous research into the traitor's past actions, Smiley has devised a plan of attack.

Never had Smiley gone into battle knowing so little and expecting so much. He felt lured, and he felt pursued. Yet when he tired, and drew back for a moment, and considered the logic of what he was about, it almost eluded him. He glanced back and saw the jaws of failure waiting for him. He peered forward and through his moist spectacles saw the phantoms of great hopes dancing in the mist. ... Yet he advanced without ultimate conviction.

It's mid-1974 and the battle arena encompasses Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Hong Kong has another twenty-plus years as a part of the British empire, which has been cut down in size as much as the Circus but for different reasons.

We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it.

With much of the Circus' old networks blown, Smiley turns to the Honourable Jerry Westerby, journalist and "occasional" agent, to be his man in the field. Westerby has spent time reporting in war zones, and he'll need those hard-won skills as Smiley directs his steps into the tumultuous Southeast Asia of 1975. The Khmer Rouge is gearing up to create their killing fields in Cambodia while the US is in its last inglorious days before pulling out entirely from Vietnam.

In the East, sport, survival is knowing what you don't know.

Published in 1977, The Honourable Schoolboy feels different from its predecessors; this isn't a criticism. My only quibble was that I
wasn't entirely convinced about the motivation for the protagonist's course of action in the final chapters. Around 1974 or so, John le Carré had traveled in the company of a journalist throughout Southeast Asia and Hong Kong to capture the feel of the times. The place descriptions are strongly evocative. The speech of Westerby and his journalist colleagues are heavily peppered with the idioms of the decade. Excluding Smiley and his chosen, the characters in this international cast reflect the racist and sexist attitudes of their period (which probably still exists today albeit better masked).

But when I look at the themes, this novel is unmistakably by le Carré. There's a pervasive sense of diminishment or of loss - not only experienced by the Circus, by the British empire, but also by Western political philosophy. As Smiley plots in order to save the Circus, he will find more than two players on the gameboard. Worse, Smiley may not realize in time just which game is actually in play. Who else will need to be sacrificed?

To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.

... 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.

... These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.

The Honourable Schoolboy can be read as a standalone. But if you haven't yet picked up Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, then read these two books in their proper sequence.