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David's epitaph on that relationship is as cold as a mirror: "You reach the point of emotional bankruptcy; the only thing you can do is walk away from it." Such bankruptcy is a frequent emotion of his characters; they too walk away—from spying, from each other, sometimes from life itself. But his more successful operatives are those who somehow manage to retain a human, familial touch and a sense of the land. This reflects Cornwell's present state of mind. For a decade, England has taken more than 80% of his income. Yet, tempted to seek overseas tax havens, he admits, finally, "I can't live elsewhere: this country is the source for me. I understand the choreography here."
The stately minuets of Smiley, the waltzes of his subordinates, the frugs and polkas of his rivals and enemies are all perfectly timed and performed in Le Carré's works; the choreographer does indeed know his nation and its people. Nevertheless, the thoroughly English writer relies a bit too heavily on foreign literary sources. Turgenev is a longtime enthusiasm, and Balzac is a novelist toward whom he is idolatrous. The Frenchman, insists Le Carré, is unparalleled for "sheer narrative thrust: everything has a material connection. There's no style, just fact, fact, fact." He has a special affection for an imagined cast: "I can see myself, like Balzac, inquiring after them on my deathbed." Such admiration can be as seductive—and as lethal—as a spy's gentleness. For despite its style and tongue-and-groove plotting, The Honourable Schoolboy sometimes displays a Balzacian tendency to turn urges into passions, to exaggerate expression into melodrama. Moreover, facts, facts, facts are better left to the journalist-reprobates. Le Carré's long suit is not, after all, reportage, but a "second soul" that amplifies the century's dilemmas.
The author can understand Kim Philby not only as a traitor but as "an extraordinary, disappointed man who wanted to get his own back on the institutions that maimed him." Le Carré regards Soviet persecution of dissenters as one of the greatest contemporary evils (it is significant, he notes, that the Soviet Union has produced great spies but ngreat spy novelists). Yet his name appeared on an ad favoring British sanctuary for American Army deserters. Clearly such an author has not only written about but lived a central paradox. Allen Dulles, onetime head of the CIA, acknowledged the paradox when he wrote: "The question is whether we can improve our security system, consistent with the maintenance of our free way of life and a free press."
"We say in the West," says Le Carré, "that we want to produce the loosest possible system which gives the greatest amount of individual freedom to each individual and minority. But in the defense of the individual we have to turn ourselves into a collective. Whatever wars rage outside, there remains a constant one inside: the open society versus the closed one."