In its 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: accounts of CIA drug experiments and poison cigars, spy satellites and submarine salvage ships, assassination machinations, all more outlandish than any imaginative work. To compete against such headlines, the novelist has to do more than reiterate events; he has to heighten and humanize them. Enter George Smiley.
The spy genre has twin traditions: Great Bad Writing and Great Good Writing. In the Manichaean world of Great Bad Books, evil is always more compelling than heroism. Such works as John Buchan's The 39 Steps construct elaborate international conspiracies; Sax Rohmer's exemplary Fu Manchu series features a supervillain "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." From there it is only a bullet's journey to Ian Fleming's Doctor No.
The higher road, paved by Eric Ambler and Graham Greene and improved by Le Carré, leads to an ambiguous plane where neither side has a moral exclusive. The flares of hot and cold wars illuminate enemies with human faces. The agent's mind is as balkanized as the lands he travels; betrayal becomes a way of life. The message no longer echoes national anthems but T.S. Eliot's Gerontion: "Think/ Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices/ Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues/ Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes."
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 back, but did not invent, the realistic spy story, it was misinterpreted as a great new wave."