Complimentary, My Dear leCarre

Austin-Healys and buxom blonde starlets do not impress John le Carre. The veteran British spy novelist writes fiction, not fantasy; the fast cars and bikini-clad counterspies that dominate the pleasantly foolish world of James Bond and Matt Helm have no-place in his books. To le Carre, the cloak-and-dagger game is really a business, and the men and women who work at it are hardly likely to decorate cinema marquees.

Unlike the current breed of master spy, they aren't likely to wind up in jail for perjury, either. Le Carre goes a long way in his realism, stripping away the Barbie-doll glamor that clings to the image of the secret agent. LeCarre instead sculpts sensitive human beings that live and breathe.

The Honourable Schoolboy, arguably le Carre's best novel since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold landed him on the publisher's all-star team, carries that strain of realism to its logical and dramatic conclusion. Taking up where he left off in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carre chronicles the efforts of a demoralized Secret Service to regain its reputation and, more important, its sense of self-respect, in the wake of its infiltration by a Soviet double agent. The task falls on the shoulders of George Smiley, typically a shrewd but atypically a paunchy and unglamorous secret agent. Moving to the offensive, Smiley assigns Jerry Westerby--dubbed "the honourable schoolboy" for his noble lineage and his bookish manner--to snarl the operations of the Soviet spy network. In usual fashion, Westerby's mission takes him to Hong Kong and Indochina, into the middle of an international narcotics ring and a KGB scheme to subvert a pack of Red Chinese politicos--and unavoidably, into a few bedrooms as well. But somewhere along the way, Westerby begins thinking unsoldierish thoughts, railing not only against the moves of the high-handed CIA "cousins" he runs up against, but also against his own training and beliefs. What results is an intense emotional conflict to play counterpoint to the usual shoot-em-up spy duel, a remarkable spy story that ruthlessly dissects the tortured moral rationalizations that make up the mind of a cloak-and-dagger king.

Like its hero, The Honourable Schoolboy is all too obviously imperfect. In his effort to detail the slow, agonizing life of the aging spy, le Carre has gone overboard, producing a novel of epic proportions that conveys a theme of only moderate importance. What begins as a portrait of tired, dirty, washed-out and disillusioning reality becomes a frequently tedious chronicle of flatulent, hemmorhoidal and unnecessarily repulsive dreariness. The author uses a bludgeon when a tap on the shoulder would suffice--and heavy-handedness goes beyond his unsubtle attempts to expose the spy game. Le Carre's blatant symbolism, his clumsy equation of the declining British Empire with its near-broken Secret Service, borders on the embarrassing. The equation fails not, of course, because it isn't accurate, but because it is so obvious and, in the end, so trivial. The author would be well advised to leave the political profundity to the philosophers and sociologists, and stick to the gut-level dramatic dialogue that he knows best.

For le Carre knows it very well, indeed. The Honourable Schoolboy showcases le Carre in top writing form, recreating the steamy, fetid cities of Indochina and the chummy, gin-soaked air of a British club with genuine flair. Moreover, his marvelous ear for dialogue has developed an unprecedented sharpness: unlike the characters in his previous books, the Americans in The Honourable Schoolboy not only speak differently from the British, but each character boasts a subtle regional accent, as well. No one sounds like Perry Mason, either--which alone sets the book apart from a shelf-full of other British espionage tales. In fact, all of le Carre's characters are so strong, so engaging in their own sleazy, desperate way, that the book should boost the author beyond the inevitable comparisons with Graham Greene, into his own class as one of the most accomplished storytellers of the past 20 years.

And in the end, that is what distinguishes The Honourable Schoolboy from the rest of the books on the "Mystery" shelf: it is, at bottom, a tremendous story, or more exactly, stories--for le Carre has conveniently woven in enough tangled subplots to keep not only the most devoted spy thriller fan, but also the most fascinated student of human nature, absorbed. What drives the le Carre fans is not absurd schemes to take over the world, nor, of course, masturbatory fantasies, replete with sadistic fiends and willing damsels-in-distress. Rather, these are stories about men and women struggling to keep their heads above the filth that has become their lives, trying to rationalize the job they must do with a moral code that they have already stretched to the breaking point. For le Carre, those stories come together to create a masterpiece of entertainment. For the reader willing to think about them closely, they may in the end mean much more.

And in the end, that is what distinguishes The Honourable Schoolboy from the rest of the books on the "Mystery" shelf: it is, at bottom, a tremendous story, or more exactly, stories--for le Carre has conveniently woven in enough tangled subplots to keep not only the most devoted spy thriller fan, but also the most fascinated student of human nature, absorbed. What drives the le Carre fans is not absurd schemes to take over the world, nor, of course, masturbatory fantasies, replete with sadistic fiends and willing damsels-in-distress. Rather, these are stories about men and women struggling to keep their heads above the filth that has become their lives, trying to rationalize the job they must do with a moral code that they have already stretched to the breaking point. For le Carre, those stories come together to create a masterpiece of entertainment. For the reader willing to think about them closely, they may in the end mean much more.