Word: carrã
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Those impudent crimes are the subject of Le Carr??'s new volume The Honourable Schoolboy, published this week in the U.S. (Knopf; $10.95). Like the author's dazzling bestsellers, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the latest adventures of Smiley offer the genre a renewal, not a revolution. "When I first began writing," recalls Le Carr??, "Fleming was riding high, and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could lay the women, and drive the fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry and escape. When I brought...
...other direction and a novel becomes pretension in a dust jacket. The author of The Honourable Schoolboy manages to skirt both terminals. But even he comes too close for comfort. Can the spy novel continue to grow without losing its value as entertainment? For David Cornwell?John le Carr???George Smiley, it is, in every sense of the word, a vital question for British intelligence.?Stefan Kanfer
...wave had a tidal force. Le Carr??'s first books proclaimed a new talent. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold became part of the language. Its antihero, Alec Leamas, was the personification of that burnt-out case, that necessary evil, the cold war spy. Tinker, Tailor earned more money than any other espionage novel, and The Honourable Schoolboy is about to smash its record. The novel, now in third printing before publication, is the October main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club; paperback rights have been purchased by Bantam Books for $1 million. The only arena...
...like the ectomorphic Smiley, The Honourable Schoolboy resists shrinkage. Its events are febrile, its local color relentless and sometimes overlong. This often obscures suspense and the Le Carr?? trademark: a fine irony that smashes beautiful political theories with hard facts. That irony is apparent in the very word Circus (see box), center of British intelligence. Once a roiling three-ring operation, the place now resembles a shabby, peeling carnival depleted of funds and dignity...
...excels Le Carr?? in sense of place?particularly when the place is secret service headquarters. The sunless corridors, the peculiar amalgam of research, bureaucratic fatigue and hostility are brilliantly rendered. Power struggles become palpable: Smiley's conversations brim with silences and ambiguities; throwaway lines can hang a man, and one quiet meeting results in a British victory over some brash "cousins" in the CIA. Cruelty abounds, but so does guilt. Smiley believes implicitly in the need for clandestine agents, but he knows that his scholarly gains will soon be absorbed by his dreaded allies?the Americans...