Word: smileyness
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...present emergency, Britain is no longer represented by the Lion and Unicorn. Its new emblem is an owl. His name is George Smiley and he is by all standards a most incongruous symbol. The man is a perpetual cuckold. He is portly, rumpled, bespectacled, with a tendency to puff when ascending stairs and to polish his glasses with his tie. He is donnish and vague. He is also the premier spy of his time...
Which seems fitting. Smiley's creator, John le Carré, 45, is the premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time. In part, of course, Le Carré's success is due to subject matter. Espionage is an immemorial tradition. In Sparta, undercover agents formed the Krypteia?the Secret Force. Two thousand years later the Krypteia remains forceful, but not quite as secret. Scarcely a month passes without some well-broadcast defection from Eastern Europe; hardly a week goes by without some new charge about intelligence excesses in the West. In the post-Watergate epoch, almost any revelation seems credible...
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...
...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 Kanfer
...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...