The Honourable Schoolboy

by John le Carre

• ISBN13: 9780743457910
• ISBN10: 0743457919
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-29
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

John le Carre's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.In this classic masterwork, le Carre expands upon his extraordinary vision of a secret world as George Smiley goes on the attack.In the wake of a demoralizing infiltration by a Soviet double agent, Smiley has been made ringmaster of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service). Determined to restore the organization's health and reputation, and bent on revenge, Smiley thrusts his own handpicked operative into action. Jerry Westerby, "The Honourable Schoolboy," is dispatched to the Far East. A burial ground of French, British, and American colonial cultures, the region is a fabled testing ground of patriotic allegiances'and a new showdown is about to begin.

Author Biography

John Le Carré was born in 1931 and lives in Cornwall, England. His eighteen novels have been translated into thirty-seven languages and include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Single & Single, and his most recent book, The Constant Gardener, all available from Pocket Books.

Excerpts

Chapter 1: How the Circus Left Town Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London's secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was some sixty years ago, when "that arch-cad Bill Haydon" was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon's very name struck a chill into them. It does so even today. For it was this same Haydon who, while still at Oxford, was recruited by Karla the Russian as a "mole" or "sleeper" -- or, in English, agent of penetration -- to work against them. And who with Karla's guidance entered their ranks and spied on them for thirty years or more. And whose eventual discovery -- thus the line of reasoning -- brought the British so low that they were forced into a fatal dependence upon their American sister service, whom they called in their own strange jargon "the Cousins." The Cousins changed the game entirely, said the blimpish fellow, much as he might have deplored power tennis or bodyline bowling. And ruined it too, said his seconds.To less-flowery minds, the true genesis was Haydon's unmasking by George Smiley and Smiley's consequent appointment as caretaker chief of the betrayed service, which occurred in the late November of 1973. Once George had got Karla under his skin, they said, there was no stopping him; the rest was inevitable. Poor old George: but what a mind under all that burden!One scholarly soul, a researcher of some sort -- in the jargon, a "burrower" -- even insisted, in his cups, upon January 26, 1841, as the natural date, when a certain Captain Elliot of the Royal Navy took a landing party to a fog-laden rock called Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River and a few days later proclaimed it a British colony. With Elliot's arrival, said the scholar, Hong Kong became the headquarters of Britain's opium trade to China, and in consequence one of the pillars of the Imperial economy. If the British had not invented the opium market -- he said, not entirely serious -- then there would have been no case, no ploy, no dividend; and therefore no renaissance of the Circus following Bill Haydon's traitorous depredations.Whereas the hard men -- the grounded fieldmen, the trainers, and the case officers who made their own murmured caucus always -- they saw the question solely in operational terms. They pointed to Smiley's deft footwork in tracking down Karla's paymaster in Vientiane; to Smiley's handling of the girl's parents; and to his wheeling and dealing with the reluctant barons of Whitehall, who held the operational purse strings and dealt out rights and permissions in the secret world. Above all, to the wonderful moment where he turned the operation round on its own axis. For these pros, the case was a victory of technique. Nothing more. They saw the shot-gun marriage with the Cousins as just another skilful bit of tradecraft in a long and delicate poker game. As to the final outcome: to hell. The king is dead, so long live the next one.The debate continues wherever old comrades meet, though the name of Jerry Westerby, understandably, is seldom mentioned. Occasionally, it is true, somebody does, out of foolhardiness or sentiment or plain forgetfulness, dredge it up, and there is atmosphere for a moment; but it passes. Only the other day a young probationer just out of the Circus's refurbished training school at Sarratt -- in the jargon again, "the Nursery" -- piped it out in the under-thirties bar, for instance. A watered-down version of the Dolphin case had recently been introduced at Sarratt as material for syndicate discussion -- even playlets -- and the poor boy, still very green, was brimming with excitement to discover he was in the know. "But myGod,"he protested, enjoying the kind of fool's freedom sometimes granted to naval midshipmen in t