John le Carré (1931–2020)

The eighth book in the series, written more than a decade after the previous entry, Smiley’s People (which has since been declared the final book of the “Karla Trilogy”). But le Carré was nothing if not willing to play with the expectations of his readers, and if the nine Smiley novels (until son Nick Harkaway’s recent addition) don’t always feature George Smiley as the central character, he is at least in there somewhere influencing events…

Which is not strictly true here. Or show more rather, it is. Sort of.

The narrator of The Secret Pilgrim is an ex-agent of the Circus, active during the events recounted in the Karla novels, and now the director of the Service’s spy school, Sarratt. He has invited Smiley, long since retired, to give a talk to the graduating class. And each reminiscence and bon mot uttered by Smiley during his after-dinner speech triggers a recollection by the narrator of a past mission for the Circus…

It’s a good read, and typical le Carré, in as much as it makes an impressive number of serious points about British society and its over-reliance on the inbred scions of its over-educated and under-gifted upper echelons… but it still feels a bit like filler material from a campaign module for Smiley’s World™.

And if that sounds unfair, then it likely is, if only because The Secret Pilgrim is presented as if it were part of the Smiley story arc when it is at best a pendant to it. Again, it’s a good read, and on a par with other books in the series, but it’s only just a George Smiley novel.

Le Carré has been praised by many, but is still I think under-appreciated. He was popular, in the way popular crime novel series are popular, which leads many to underestimate just how clever, and how critical of the UK establishment, his novels were. It’s easy enough to dismiss him as a writer of spy fiction, and especially convoluted spy fiction at that (compared to, well, Fleming), if the response to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is any indication.

Like Fleming, le Carré wore his politics on his sleeve. Unlike Fleming, they weren’t the usual Tory reactionary bollocks by those sucking up to, with a complete lack of self-awareness, the aristocracy, but an educated, thoughtful and critical view of British society and the establishment. When Fleming told some dowager duchess he was writing a novel, she told him not to because “You’re not clever enough, Ian”, which tells you how the aristocracy viewed themselves and how they viewed those who sought their company and approval. But then the British have always confused education with intelligence, much as the Americans have always confused wealth with intelligence. Le Carré was intelligent - and the proof is there in his novels. Fleming wasn’t - and, again, the proof is there in his novels.

Guess which has earned the most money…

Read le Carré. You can’t go wrong with his novels. You might even learn something about being British as well (although you may not like being British afterwards). show less

This is one of the great spy novels, and is clearly modelled in no small degree on the story of Kim Philby, the 'Third Man' who not only tipped off Burgess and MacLean in 1951 and allowed them to escape before they could be arrested for leaking secrets, but then escaped himself in 1963 after his guilt had eventually been uncovered. Set at the height of the Cold War it recounts the search for a 'mole' within the upper echelons of the Secret Service.

George Smiley, 'an old spy in a hurry' is show more brought back from the involuntary retirement into which he had been pushed just a couple of years previously. He reluctantly accedes to be commissioned to investigate an allegation that one of the four officers at the head of MI6 might in fact be a long-established Russian spy. 'It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?' This is the question put to Smiley by Oliver Lacon, 'Whitehall's head prefect', after he has explained the evidence that has finally convinced him of the existence of the mole. There is a poignant undercurrent to all of this because Smiley’s enforced retirement had come about because he had raised the same concerns about the possibility of a highly placed mole, but his claims had been dismissed as a manifestation of sour grapes after his own position had suffered following a restructuring of the Intelligence Service.

There are four suspects: Percy Alleline ('Tinker'), dour Scotsman and acting Chief of Service; Bill Haydon ('Tailor'), flamboyant wunderkind, alternately mentor and hero to the Service's younger generation of aspirants; Roy Bland ('Soldier'), would-be academic and ultimate self-seeking pragmatist; and Toby Esterhase ('Poor Man'), opportunistic Hungarian émigré desperate for promotion and convinced that no-one shows him the respect he deserves. Control, the former head of the Service, had managed to reach this far before, acting entirely on his own, but as his health rapidly failed he embarked upon one wild last throw to flush the traitor out. This was the venture subsequently known as 'Operation Testify', alluded to throughout the book though the full extent of its disastrous nature is only revealed near the end.

The reverberations of Operation Testify echo through the Service for years afterwards. Control is forced into retirement and dies almost immediately. In the reorganisation that followed Smiley was also pushed into retirement. Alleline takes over, with Haydon as his deputy, and the new world order seems to have begun. On the other side of the world, however, Ricki Tarr, a rough and ready member of the Service, accustomed to infiltrating gun-running gangs, meets Irina, a Russian agent in Hong Kong. Their affair is hectic and hasty, and she tells Tarr of the greatest secret that she knows: there is a Soviet mole, with the code name 'Gerald' in the highest echelons of the Service. She does not know many details but does have enough facts to convince Tarr that she is telling the truth. He passes the information back to the Circus, but receives no reply. However, Irina is almost immediately rounded up by her Soviet minders and shipped back to Russia. Tarr goes underground and eventually makes his way back to London where he contacts Guillam, and through him Lacon. The witch hunt has begun. Smiley has to track them down through the paperwork, secured through deft chicanery by his one ally on the inside, the redoubtable Peter Guillam whose own career was truncated.

Le Carre offers none of the glamour and fantasy world cavortings of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels. Smiley and his associates have to grapple with the shabby and entirely mundane underbelly of the espionage world, working back through the files, and eye-witness accounts of previous failed operations. There is absolutely no glamour or sparkle about the story at all, though that serves to boost its compelling nature. It is also immensely redolent of the early 1970s. All the way through the book characters are freezing cold, huddled in their coats and struggling to generate any warmth at all. The enigmas and moral dilemmas, though, remain timeless.

This is a fascinating and engaging novel, that improves with every re-reading. The excellent BBC television series captured the feel of the novel very well, although the book (as is so often the case) is even better. Don't bother with the Gary Oldman film though - I haven't seen such a dreadful screen adaptation of an excellent book since they butchered [The Bonfire of the Vanities]. show less

Apparently, many people read John Le Carré’s spy novels for a glimpse at what the world of international espionage is really like; in other words, they read them like a kind of journalism about the shady world of Intelligence Services. And there certainly is something to it – we’ve grown used to a more realistic perspective on secret services, but we can still imagine what it must have been like to read a novel like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold for someone whose idea of spy show more thrillers were Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Le Carré profoundly debunked the myths about the spy trade, showing it to be a world not of elegant womanizers lounging in luxurious surroundings, but of middle-aged men holding bureaucratic meetings in dull offices, not of noble deeds and lofty aims but of petty infighting and political maneuvering. The novels of Le Carré were filled with detailed descriptions and precise observations, and had authenticity written all over them and thoroughly destroyed any conception of glamour clinging to the spy profession – today, nobody would consider a James Bond novel anything but fantasy.

The Honourable Schoolboy lends itself with particular ease to such a journalistic reading due to the place and time it is set in: a very large part of the novel takes place in Hong Kong and South-East Asia during the retreat of the United States from Vietnam and a lot of room is given to highly atmospheric descriptions of the situation, of the feelings of uncertainty, unrest and frustration pervading the area during that period – making this by far the longest book of Le Carré’s so far. Even though Le Carré’s account is fictional, he appears to have done an impressive amount of research for it, and I doubt any journalistic, presumably non-fictional report could do a better job at painting a picture that is both authentic and immersive.

Therefore, one might consider The Honourable Schoolboy worth reading on those merits alone. But Le Carré’s ambition for this and his other novels does not extend to merely being reportage, this novel, like his previous ones, aims for something more, and I think that it is this which makes them stand out. And this is not just true for the novels’ content but for their form, too – quite often, the apparently realistic exterior of Le Carré’s spy novels conceals inner mechanisms that do not run by the same rules governing realistic narratives but are structurally quite experimental. The Honourable Schoolboy is another example of this – its main thematic concern is with truth and its uses, and the novel’s forms reflects this, even if it is by adding its own distortions in the process.

Towards the end of the novel, one of the characters quotes from a poem by John Donne:

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

This, even if it comes late in the novel, after its plot and its protagonists have taken many turns about and about, constitutes something like the motto for The Honourable Schoolboy. Indeed the whole novel could be taken as a variation on the poem those lines comes from, Donne’s Satire III, to the point where it feels that one might place both works next to each other and draw in the correspondences. Correspondence is part of the novel’s theme, too, as it is set not just in Asia but has London as a major setting too, and the events in both spheres, while never shown to result from each other immediately, do influence each other in oblique ways that had me think more than once of the Renaissance alchemy concept of correspondence, where things not directly connected still work upon each other by way of mystic similarities. Except, of course, that there is nothing mystical at place here, but the driving forces are mostly political in nature – but not really any less obscure for that.

There is a recurring image in the novel of truth as a small circle or kernel, surrounded by layers upon layers of untruth that grow steadily larger, up to the outer ring which is a vast area of rumour and obfuscation. The novel in fact starts with out rumours, and continues to refer to them, in the plot and by way of its anonymous narrator who tries to pierce through the mist of lies and half-truths surrounding “Operation Dolphin” to arrive at its kernel of truth. And both Jerry Westerby and George Smiley, the novel’s main protagonists, are surrounded by rumours, putting the reader in a very similar position of having to cross through obfuscation to arrive at the truth. A truth that becomes ever more elusive the further the novel proceeds, and it eventually becomes clear that for all its descriptive vividness and journalistic authenticity, the novel lets us see its kernel of truth only through a thick haze of distraction and misinformation. In fact, its undoubtedly brilliant journalistic element might constitute precisely that haze – one can hardly consider it accidental that so much of the novel takes place among journalist and that one of its main protagonists is a journalist who has no scruples to manipulate the truth when it serves his purposes and who in turn is manipulated by his employers in London. By the end of The Honourable Schoolboy it is by no means that there every was any kernel of truth at all, and if there was, it might be impossible to find – but not for epistemological reasons but because it has been so distorted and hidden under layers and layers of obfuscation by political power plays that it is simply gone, and the wanderer, when he takes that last turn that last turn that will take him up to the summit of that hill, finds himself on top of a sheer cliff, stepping off into the air. show less

In this book, Le Carré continues his theme of updating the spy novel by focusing on its contemporary forms. In this case, his target is the private broker trading information and muscle with government operators who prefer to keep things out of the public eye.
With his usual understated style, he directs considerable anger at those who do undercover operations for money – clearly separating them from those in the official business who do necessary bad stuff on principle. In his cold war show more novels, there is a distinct ambivalence about doing nasty things in the service of the state. You do what you have to do to prevent a worse outcome, but you become morally compromised and that bothers you. The novels with more modern themes don’t have that ambivalence. The perpetrators are self-interested venal thieves and murderers with links into the spy world. In this story, they have enticed an ambitious, and equally venal, junior minister into a poorly judged and poorly executed scheme. The minister loses his political future, his staffers are shifted out to plumb positions where they won’t be around to raise any questions, and the private brokers carry on in apparent luxury. Interestingly, it seems to be the state security service who cleans things up to avoid embarassing the government.
While this is the scene, the attention is really on the decent Britons who are entrapped in the scheme without being aware of it. When they get wind that things did not go as they were told, they want to put things right. Of course, this will involve significant cost to themselves, and the barriers they have to overcome make up the bulk of the novel. This part is Le Carré’s familiar storytelling, low-key spycraft slowly leading to a conclusion. His oblique style of dialogue is also familiar here, with characters carefully saying one thing in a chummy middle-class voice and meaning something other. Perhaps this is how it’s done in this world.
For Le Carré, these decent Britons are the flawed heros of the story. They are not perfect – they have second thoughts, they wonder if it’s worth it, they are distracted. For this novel, they seem a bit too decent. They choose to do the right thing, knowing that there will be consequences. In his other novels, Le Carré’s characters seem to do what they have to do because they don’t have a choice. The situations force them to make the only choice they can short of selling out. While I don’t doubt that there are decent honorable civil servants in Britain, this sort of purity makes the story line a little questionable.
And then there’s the moral dis-equivalency. State agencies, including the British security services, carry out operations to protect their interests and the interests of their political superiors. To what extent does it matter that the operations are carried out by mercenaries? Are the controls really set to a higher standard for state actors than for their hirelings? I do think that there is a potential for greater control when government oversight is involved but there’s also a potential for greater self-justification. But does that justify the level of outrage that Le Carré reflects here? Or, to go deeper, how is the combination of state and private action in this story different from the machinations against the operations of the Cold War enemies? Is it worse now because the targets are vaguely defined potential terrorists from a string of Muslim countries? Le Carré seems to think so, and perhaps he is right, but with a writer who seems to insist on a moral standard these are questions that make me question the initial premiss of the book.
In any case, at least these are questions that the story raises, unlike the action-oriented focus of many other spy stories. show less