The Honourable Schoolboy

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First: it is a lengthy book; much longer than most others in the genre--and written with rich, subtle prose. Prose honed by two decades of LeCarre's experience with the novel form. Every chapter is liquid, supple, silky. His best writing in a long time. Splendidly restrained, tempered, calm, and observant throughout. It's a sustained exercise in pacing and suspense which exists nowhere else in the genre, handled as finely. I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir. The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers, of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member. Shake it!" (436) Now, in his protagonist: we meet what may be LeCarre's most human, likeable character ever. Jerry Westerby, foreign correspondent; the eponymous 'schoolboy'. Affable, courageous, cynical, seasoned. A more complete and sympathetic version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold's 'Alec Leamas' (played by Richard Burton in the hit movie).

If, with James Bond, Ian Fleming gave us a pop-up Kennedy, all Fifties flash and missile crisis, for the Seventies Mr. le Carré has George Smiley waiting for Godot. To start with, this book has little connection with the Karla-Smiley story of Tinker, Tailor. Yes, Karla is mentioned as linked to the spies being chased but with no other role whatsoever. Smiley team is there but more as a sideshow to the juvenile story of a fringe spy falling in crazy love over a single meeting, his Southeast Asian ventures and a complex capture tale where one is never clear what the entire fuss is all about. 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 The main character is not George Smiley (although he is present in much of the novel) but Jerry Westerby, one of the Occasionals as they are referred to - foreign correspondents who do a little spying on the side. As such, it is altogether more human than either Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Smiley's People - the reader is engaged on an emotional level even though it is perhaps the most complex of the three books in terms of plot.Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.” 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.

This novel is worth following up with the nonfiction juggernaut, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy.This is the second in John le Carré’s trilogy starring George Smiley as the most important character although the main protagonist is really the man of the title, The Honourable Gerald Westerby, known as Jerry (shouldn’t that be Gerry?) Chronologically, this book follows Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but is complete in itself and the two stories are only loosely connected, so you can read this quite happily if you haven’t read TTSS. Like its predecessor, this is complicated, exciting, incredibly well thought out, difficult to predict and a joy to read.