(4 of 10)
Such bare-bones plotting gives only a hint of The Honourable Schoolboy's glistening social observation, its luminous intelligence and its immense and varied cast. Among the principals: the incomparable Lizzie, a daydreamy beautiful loser, "punchball" for many lovers, whose flaws prove even more compelling than her easy virtue: "not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain ... honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgement." Connie Sachs, Circus Sovietologist beyond compare, "a huge, crippled cunning woman, known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley's recessive factotum and "scalp hunter"—professional killer; Craw, an old China hand of archbishoprical speech and mien, shamelessly based on the form and choler of Sunday Times Correspondent Richard Hughes: "We colonize them. Your Graces ... we are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils." Ricardo, the mercenary Mexican pilot: " 'How it happened,' he said. 'Listen, I tell you how it happened.' And then I'll kill you, said his eyes." Smaller roles are no less memorable: "My minor characters are always getting out of scale," confesses their creator. "I keep promising them a treat in the next book if they'll just keep quiet now."
He 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.
Le Carré's astringent, melancholy tones will be familiar to anyone who has read his works or those of such eminences as Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios) and Graham Greene (The Third Man). Still, Ambler's works are written from the outside with sardonic imagination. Greene's achieve more intimacy, but he is careful to label them as mere "entertainments," like a student caught doodling when he should be cramming for exams. Le Carré carries no such liabilities or self-deprecations. His books are written from the inside out. "There is a kind of fatigue which only fieldmen know" observes The Honourable Schoolboy, "a temptation to gentleness which can be the kiss of death." And, "It is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example—to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know." Such sly aperçus are those of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, a man who served his term as 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.