The Honourable Schoolboy

£9.9
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The Honourable Schoolboy

The Honourable Schoolboy

RRP: £99
Price: £9.9
£9.9 FREE Shipping

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Beautifully written and expertly plotted, it also takes a razor sharp scalpel to snobbery and the British class system, and has a pleasingly authentic and complex psychological dimension.

And we all know Kim’s story, alas, a stern taboo to those of my ilk. Loose lips sink ships. But in old age I like my truths mollified, thanks very much! 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. 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. Also unlike Bond, Smiley is the star of several smart, well-written novels. Rare among thrillers, the Smiley books — there are nine of them, including A Legacy of Spies — score highly in both the qualities that people pretend to like in books (formal style, psychological portraiture, political intelligence, moral sensibility) and the qualities that people actually like in books (sex, violence, plot twists, convincing and frequently deployed spy jargon). Collectively, they form the best espionage series ever written.In the second part of John le Carré's Karla Trilogy, the battle of wits between Smiley and his Soviet adversary takes on an even more dangerous dimension. 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. After Tinker, Tailor, le Carre's fans waited many years for the follow-up The Honourable Schoolboy. When I first read the book 35 (!) years ago I recall being a little disappointed that the book wasn't more Smiley-centric, but in retrospect le Carre's shift in focus from treachery within the Circus to the exotic East was what the series needed lest it choke on its own incestuous fog. He ultimately chose a kind of 'defector' story. So far so good. But to jazz it up he chooses a 'stringer' as the lead character (Westerby is a reporter, not a career spy). This is the longest, densest, and in some ways most savage of Le Carré’s novels I’ve read, and it continues to affirm for me that he was a singular writer, even when aspects of his work feel a bit too obtuse and elusive, as some aspects do here. However, in this novel in particular, the manner in which his unflinchingly clear-eyed outrage interrogates and dissects the games played by governments and their intelligence agencies, is especially stirring, disturbing, and mournful. He is deeply interested in, and grieves for, the cost of these games on the individuals playing them, because almost all of them are deemed entirely expendable and forgettable by their lords and masters.

Anyway, there I was, reading the Schoolboy in St-Sauveur. It was a pure pleasure to own such an exalted anodyne to stress! 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 people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.” There are large passages of inaction throughout. This device serves two functions - one, it exacerbates the impact of the action - and two, it gives time and space for the author to describe in incredible depth every character in the book. It is a masterful exercise in the writing of people. The ending, which had a sad inevitability about it (not in terms of disappointment but in the way the world turns) is almost inconsequential due to the sadness you feel in just not having these characters around any more. The plot centers on people and events in Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong in particular. In the mid-1970s the area was a cauldron of conflict, pitting East against West, communism (both the Russian and Chinese varieties) against capitalism/democracy, and factions vs factions within individual countries.That said,there is no intrigue of the previous book. The twist of the tale never materialises. Too many characters are presented as caricatures of various stereotypes. The know-all Smiley himself never really crafts anything ingenious. And to top it all, the end is too incomplete even though realistic, one never knows whether Nelson, the chief villain, really mattered in the tiniest to Karla, China or the West. One is equally dark about the true nature of feelings between Jerry and Lizie, and if this was supposed to be the pinnacle of the retiring Smiley, it was simply too sad. 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.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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