Word: schoolboy
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...aging adventurer is pointed to Hong Kong, then to Southeast Asia and programmed intrigues?and unexpected sellouts. The Schoolboy's odyssey is both official and personal. As colleagues perish, as the enigmatic Ko brothers become more comprehensible, as loyalties dissolve, Jerry finds himself questioning his own motives and, finally, his orders, the discipline of his "tradecraft." The object of his sudden, intense affection is Drake Ko's beautiful mistress, Lizzie Worthington, an involvement that jeopardizes Westerby's entire mission. The carefully engineered defection of Nelson Ko becomes a ploy within a ploy with apocalyptic result...
Such bare-bones plotting gives only a hint of The Honourable Schoolboy's glistening social observation, its luminous intelligence and its immense and varied cast. Among the principals: the incomparable Lizzie, a daydreamy beautiful loser, "punchball" for many lovers, whose flaws prove even more compelling than her easy virtue: "not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain ... honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgement." Connie Sachs, Circus Sovietologist beyond compare, "a huge, crippled cunning woman, known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley...
...made good that promise with George Smiley, who was a walk-on in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But these Circus clowns and aerialists will no longer live on promises: in The Honourable Schoolboy they jostle and clamor for the reader's attention. Fieldmen, office workers, a parade of journalists and reprobates (The Honourable Schoolboy finds the two synonymous), half-castes and Orientals give the book the richness of a Victorian novel of manners...
...careful to label them as mere "entertainments," like a student caught doodling when he should be cramming for exams. Le Carré carries no such liabilities or self-deprecations. His books are written from the inside out. "There is a kind of fatigue which only fieldmen know" observes The Honourable Schoolboy, "a temptation to gentleness which can be the kiss of death." And, "It is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example?to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know." Such sly aperçus are those of Her Majesty's Loyal...
Nevertheless, the honourable schoolboy did all that was expected of him. He won a first in modern languages, married Ann Sharp, daughter of a much-decorated R.A.F. air marshal, taught at Eton, then joined the Foreign Service, "always seeking the brand names, the Good Housekeeping certificate of professions." From 1961 to 1963, Cornwell served as Second Secretary in the British embassy in Bonn; for two years after that he was a consul in Hamburg. "Again," he says, "I was plunged into an institutional life; again I felt completely alienated from...