Word: schoolboys
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Those impudent crimes are the subject of Le Carré'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 Carré, "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...
...risky business for novelists as well as for governments. Too far in one direction and a book is something to kill time?for those who like it dead. Too far in the 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 Carré?George Smiley, it is, in every sense of the word, a vital question for British intelligence.?Stefan...
...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 in which Schoolboy has so far failed to win honors...
...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 Carré 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...
...Haydon. Midway through the paper chase, coherence emerges. A devious plan unfolds, vouchsafed piecemeal to the anxious reader. The opening moves are made with Jerry Westerby, an aristocratic refugee from occasional Circus assignments now living in the Tuscany hills, where his bookish habits have earned him the sobriquet "the Schoolboy." Westerby carries the spy's classic cards of identity: robust health, womanizing instincts and moral numbness. With words that could have been set to music by Sir Edward Elgar, Smiley reminds his operative of a historian who "wrote of generations that are born into debtors' prisons and spend their lives...