Most long novels would benefit from a firmer editorial hand. Anything over 400 pages is suspect. The Honourable Schoolboy is 600 pages or so. It has its merits, but it’s a bloated, indulgent book, like a bad extended director’s cut of Le Carré’s stellar earlier work.
We’re again immersed in the world of the British Secret Service as its head, George Smiley, tries to get one over his Russian nemesis Karla by disrupting some kind of operation in Hong Kong, China, and sundry other countries of the region. Smiley’s main weapon of disruption is a somewhat erratic agent called Jerry Westerby.
The main indulgence is the decision to give equal time to both Smiley’s efforts in London and Westerby’s in the field. We effectively get two novels, one a strangely gripping tale of Smiley’s low-key burrowing in files, tense committee meetings, and interviews with sources, the other a strangely ungripping story of Westerby’s Bond-lite traipsing around the South China Sea under tenuous journalistic cover. Either one would have done, preferably the former.
The main bloat seems to come from an author trying a little too hard, in several respects. First, this book perhaps marks the point at which Le Carré is no longer writing from first-hand experience and leaning instead on research and imagination, and so perhaps is laying on rather too thick the spycraft jargon and local atmosphere in a bid to convince us that he still knows what he’s talking about.
Second, where earlier works set scenes and dealt with elisions quickly and neatly, here Le Carré spends ages getting things going (with barbs about journalisms and publishing that again indicate his firm establishment in a different world), and talks round obfuscations by employing a very tricksy and slightly annoying authorial voice to explain in great detail how nobody really knows anything about this particular plot point. It’s like he’s overthinking how to be a writer as opposed to just writing.
Third, the plot is incredibly convoluted—both the plot of the book and the Russian plot that is being uncovered. I suppose we expect that, but again it does feel just a little like there’s too much thought going in to making this as complicated as possible.
The bloat also means that minor problems in Le Carré’s earlier work are amplified. He was always weak with women, for example, but got away with it because they were minor characters. Here, we have a fairly incredible femme fatale type figure playing a key role, getting seasoned spies and hardened criminals into all sorts of trouble by being really very attractive. She’s in the Westerby bits, obviously. In general, there’s an air of the ludicrous in a lot of the Westerby that you don’t find in, for example, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Being a director’s cut, though, all the good stuff is still there—as I say, the book has its merits. The plot is convoluted, but also a marvel of engineering. There are exciting committee meetings. There are good thriller-ish scenes, some good bits in Vietnam. Smiley is great. The air overall is still bleak enough to please the cynic about the spy game. I guess overall I enjoyed it, I just think I would have enjoyed less of it more.