Word: schoolboy
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...Carre knows it very well, indeed. The Honourable Schoolboy showcases le Carre in top writing form, recreating the steamy, fetid cities of Indochina and the chummy, gin-soaked air of a British club with genuine flair. Moreover, his marvelous ear for dialogue has developed an unprecedented sharpness: unlike the characters in his previous books, the Americans in The Honourable Schoolboy not only speak differently from the British, but each character boasts a subtle regional accent, as well. No one sounds like Perry Mason, either--which alone sets the book apart from a shelf-full of other British espionage tales...
...Honourable Schoolboy, arguably le Carre's best novel since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold landed him on the publisher's all-star team, carries that strain of realism to its logical and dramatic conclusion. Taking up where he left off in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carre chronicles the efforts of a demoralized Secret Service to regain its reputation and, more important, its sense of self-respect, in the wake of its infiltration by a Soviet double agent. The task falls on the shoulders of George Smiley, typically a shrewd but atypically a paunchy and unglamorous secret...
Like its hero, The Honourable Schoolboy is all too obviously imperfect. In his effort to detail the slow, agonizing life of the aging spy, le Carre has gone overboard, producing a novel of epic proportions that conveys a theme of only moderate importance. What begins as a portrait of tired, dirty, washed-out and disillusioning reality becomes a frequently tedious chronicle of flatulent, hemmorhoidal and unnecessarily repulsive dreariness. The author uses a bludgeon when a tap on the shoulder would suffice--and heavy-handedness goes beyond his unsubtle attempts to expose the spy game. Le Carre's blatant symbolism...
...sharply protested a crude attempt by the KGB to blackmail a Polish-born American diplomat, Constantine Warvariv, 53, using prefabricated evidence of wartime collaboration with the Nazis. Some State Department officials, still furious about the Lusis case, suspect the attempted blackmail of Warvariv was a Soviet retaliation for the schoolboy affair. More likely, the two incidents were unrelated, except as twin pieces of evidence that spooks will be spooks, it seems, regardless of the initials under which they operate...
...Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carr...