The Honourable Schoolboy

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The Honourable Schoolboy

The Honourable Schoolboy

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Smiley perceived in himself the existence of a darker motive, infinitely more obscure, one which his rational mind continued to reject. He called it Karla, and it was true that somewhere in him, like a left-over legend, there burned the embers of hatred toward the man who had set out to destroy the temples of his private faith, whatever remained of them: the service that he loved, his friends, his country, his concept of a reasonable balance in human affairs." John le Carré calls Hong Kong the world capital of espionage of the seventies. There on the invisible battlefields the unseen combats are being fought… But the invisibility doesn’t make the mêlées less cruel. Clandestinity just makes spy battles much more psychologically complex. A terrific story, it goes without saying. For one thing, it comes from the golden age when le Carré still cared about plot. But it’s his gift for dialogue that electrifies all his books.” Readmore... Control had. Control had made a whole second, third, or fourth life for himself in a two-room upstairs flat, beside the Western bypass, under the plain name of Matthews, not filed with housekeepers as an alias. Well, "whole" life was an exaggeration. But he had kept clothes there, and a woman--Mrs. Matthews herself-_even a cat. And taken golf lessons at an artisans' club on Thursday mornings early, while from his desk in the Circus he poured scorn on the great unwashed, and on golf, and on love, and on any other piffling human pursuit which secretly might tempt him. He had even rented a garden allotment, Smiley remembered, down by a railway siding. Mrs. Matthews had insisted on driving Smiley to see it in her groomed Morris car on the day he broke the sad news to her. It was as big a mess as anyone else's allotment: standard roses, winter vegetables they hadn't used, a tool-shed crammed with hose-pipe and seed boxes." At the Circus, they are impatient with and embarrassed by Smiley's philosophizing. The Circus, as we learned in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," has enough trouble. Having been penetrated at the very highest level, it knows its entire system

The height of the Cold War. It is 1962, only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas, a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer, finds his network in East Berlin is in complete tatters. All his agents are either on the run or dead, victims of the ruthlessly efficient East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt. Leamas is recalled to London. Apparently, many people read John Le Carré’s spy novels for a glimpse at what the world of international espionage is really like; in other words, they read them like a kind of journalism about the shady world of Intelligence Services. And there certainly is something to it – we’ve grown used to a more realistic perspective on secret services, but we can still imagine what it must have been like to read a novel like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold for someone whose idea of spy thrillers were Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Le Carré profoundly debunked the myths about the spy trade, showing it to be a world not of elegant womanizers lounging in luxurious surroundings, but of middle-aged men holding bureaucratic meetings in dull offices, not of noble deeds and lofty aims but of petty infighting and political maneuvering. The novels of Le Carré were filled with detailed descriptions and precise observations, and had authenticity written all over them and thoroughly destroyed any conception of glamour clinging to the spy profession – today, nobody would consider a James Bond novel anything but fantasy.That said,there is no intrigue of the previous book. The twist of the tale never materialises. Too many characters are presented as caricatures of various stereotypes. The know-all Smiley himself never really crafts anything ingenious. And to top it all, the end is too incomplete even though realistic, one never knows whether Nelson, the chief villain, really mattered in the tiniest to Karla, China or the West. One is equally dark about the true nature of feelings between Jerry and Lizie, and if this was supposed to be the pinnacle of the retiring Smiley, it was simply too sad. He had done everything they had asked for: gotten them all the intelligence on the upcoming hand-off. Smiley rightly saw though, that Westerby was unraveling. He was too attached to Lizzie; he was in danger of upsetting the transfer somehow. Like a lot of John le Carre novels, especially the Karla trilogy, this novel explored the notions of the individual, loyalty, and humanity. The juxtaposition of George Smiley, representing the old, fast-fading notion of national loyalty, and Jerry Westerby, representing an individual's search for humanity in an increasingly cynical and violent world, was very interesting. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2009-07-22 20:30:46 Boxid IA101413 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon 5D City New York Containerid_2 X0008 Donor

Smiley dispatches Jerry Westerby, a newspaper reporter and occasional Circus operative, to Hong Kong under the guise of a sports journalist. Westerby traces the Soviet money to Drake Ko, a local businessman with links to both the criminal underworld and the British establishment. London establishes that Drake Ko has a brother, Nelson, who is a high-ranking Chinese official and who has been spying on the Chinese for the Soviets. This is the longest, densest, and in some ways most savage of Le Carré’s novels I’ve read, and it continues to affirm for me that he was a singular writer, even when aspects of his work feel a bit too obtuse and elusive, as some aspects do here. However, in this novel in particular, the manner in which his unflinchingly clear-eyed outrage interrogates and dissects the games played by governments and their intelligence agencies, is especially stirring, disturbing, and mournful. He is deeply interested in, and grieves for, the cost of these games on the individuals playing them, because almost all of them are deemed entirely expendable and forgettable by their lords and masters. Beautifully written and expertly plotted, it also takes a razor sharp scalpel to snobbery and the British class system, and has a pleasingly authentic and complex psychological dimension. eorge Smiley says: "A lot of people haven't these days. The will. Specially in England. A lot of people see doubt as a legitimate

Feliks wrote: "You've come to the right man. As I recall (after the pow-wow with George in the hotel) Westerby was being escorted out of the picture. He was being pulled out of the situation altogether and being ..."

Published in 1977, The Honourable Schoolboy feels different from its predecessors; this isn't a criticism. My only quibble was that I philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas, of course, really they're nowhere." Of George Smiley, failed priest, lonesome man, it is said: "One day, one of two things will happen to George. He'llJohn le Carré lays bare snobbery, vanity, a sense of denial and delusion, repressed emotions, faded dreams, and incompetence. It's palpable, and often hard to read, but remains grimly compelling throughout. It’s exactly what he set out to write: a more truthful novel that captured the internal politics, the little Englander mentality, and the complacency of the mid-60s UK intelligence service. Lunch,’ Martindale announced without much optimism. They ate it upstairs, glumly, off plastic catering trays delivered by van. The partitions were too low and Guillam's custard flowed into his meat. In 1985 I began writing my first novel. I had never written before and had no idea what I was doing. About the same time I read The Little Drummer Girl , and when I was finished I immediately read it again, something I had never done before and haven’t done since. I was smitten with Charlie, the heroine, and I was enthralled by the supporting cast. I began to see that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had two sides. The story’s plots and subplots were crafted by a genius. The suspense was so smart, so clever.



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