Word: smileyness
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...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...
...foreign officer and intelligence operative. As such, Le Carré makes no apologies for his work. "The spy form is expanding for me as much as I want," he finds. "I think it's possible to do wonderful things with it." As for the spies themselves, from the sedentary George Smiley to the hyperkinetic Westerby, they too are written from an internal viewpoint: all are refractions of autobiography...
Like one of his fictive double agents, the pseudonymous author scribbled in trains, constructing the character who was to be his later ego. George Smiley bears no physical relationship to his ruddy, unconventionally handsome creator. But like Le Carré, he is an Oxonian, an avid student of German literature and an intellectual manqué. He too was married to a lady named Ann from whom he was to separate...
...Carré construction? Do his plots correspond with true moral quandaries? Says one American CIA official: "We know that our work plays havoc with our personal lives. We know that an awful lot of what we have to do is slogging through file cards and computer printouts. Poor George Smiley. That...
...next Smiley novel, Le Carré is on a Middle East shuttle. Though his plot is still incubating, the author has already uncovered a significant anecdote: "A member of Israeli intelligence told me that he once climbed a telephone pole, snipped the lines on one side with a wirecutter, turned to the other side, severed those?then went down with the telephone pole. A central metaphor for the area...