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The old wave had a tidal force. Le Carré's first books 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 is Hollywood. Tinker, Tailor resisted adaptation; major movie producers judge the new book even harder to film. One executive recently asked his script department to provide the customary single-page synopsis, a job as hopeless as carving the Lord's Prayer on the head of a studio.
For 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.
No one excels Le Carré in sense of place—particularly when the place is secret service headquarters. The sunless corridors, the peculiar amalgam of research, bureaucratic fatigue and hostility are brilliantly rendered. Power struggles become palpable: Smiley's conversations brim with silences and ambiguities; throwaway lines can hang a man, and one quiet meeting results in a British victory over some brash "cousins" in the CIA. Cruelty abounds, but so does guilt. Smiley believes implicitly in the need for clandestine agents, but he knows that his scholarly gains will soon be absorbed by his dreaded allies—the Americans.
When readers last left Smiley, he had just ferreted out Soviet Spy Bill Haydon—a "mole" who for years had unobtrusively buried himself in the British Secret Service. Haydon was manifestly based on Kim Philby, a principal strategist of British intelligence who defected to Russia in 1963 after two decades of spying for the Soviets. Britain's real Secret Service had to be rebuilt after the Philby scandal; the fictional one is equally shattered and in need of repair in the post-Haydon era.
Derided as the "captain of a wrecked ship," Smiley tries to find a coup so stunning it will restore the Circus' reputation—and funding. From the outset, he has one obsessive target: Karla, head of Soviet agent operations, whose spectral face stares down from its frame in Smiley's office. The relationship of the opposing spymasters, playing international chess for men's souls, is worth a book in itself. Karla is an evil genius who once instructed his mole to seduce Smiley's wife—to make the Briton doubt his motives for suspecting Haydon. Smiley's pure, patriotic zeal is simplified, and distorted, by his thirst for revenge.