Review of The Honorable Schoolboy by John Le Carre (2002, Penguin)

In the wake of the uncovering of a highly placed mole in the British Secret Service, George Smiley is determined to rebuild the Service's shattered reputation and to go on the attack. Smiley’s small team of trusted confidants search back through the mole’s work, not looking for what was stolen or disrupted but what was overlooked or ignored. What they discover is that Smiley nemesis in Moscow Centre, Karla, has an operation running in the Far East and Hong Kong is its key locus. Former journalist and spy Jerry Westerby – the Honorable Schoolboy – is plucked out of retirement and sent to Hong Kong, notionally as a reporter. From there he follows a trail to Cambodia, Laos and Thailand on the trail of two pilots left in the area after the US has pulled out. Playing politics with Whitehall and American colleagues, Smiley senses a reversal of fortunes, though it relies on Jerry staying alive and delivering the plan on his solo run through South-East Asia.

The Honorable Schoolboy is the second book in the Karla trilogy, and the sixth out nine books by Le Carre featuring George Smiley. In this outing, Smiley is trying to assess and repair the damage caused by a mole at the higher echelons of the British Secret Service. The collateral damage is huge, with people and programmes being cast aside in an effort to re-float a holed ship. At the same time, Smiley is also looking for a way to strike back at Karla, the Russian mastermind behind the mole. He finds a potential route to revenge in Hong Kong and some false accounts, and dispatches Jerry Westerby, a rehabilitated victim of the purges, to investigate. Through a fairly complex plot, with a large set of characters, Le Carre charts Smiley’s scheming and Westerby’s trail through the Far East. The storytelling is very nicely judged for much of the tale, though at times it’s a little uneven, with some sections being a masterclass in painting scenes and character development, and others feeling thin and over-extended, and the middle third was a bit plodding. I was also never really convinced by Westerby’s motivation. Overall, though, an intricate, thoughtful spy-thriller.

Review of A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carre (1968, Heinemann)

Leo Harting, second secretary in the British embassy in Bonn, has gone missing and he’s taken forty three top secret files with him.  The embassy is already in a flap given tensions with the German civil service and politicians about negotiations in Brussels for British entry to the European Union and British involvement in post-war German affairs.  An anti-British rally is scheduled and security and tensions are high.  The last thing senior officials need is Alan Turner, a hard-nosed spycatcher who doesn’t care for class-divisions or subtle diplomatic relations.  Turner starts uncovering information that nobody seems to want revealed and resistance to his presence grows.  As his investigation progresses he senses that this is no ordinary defection, but forces are conspiring to deny him the truth.

John Le Carre is in fine form in A Small Town in Germany, a tale charting the hunt for Leo Harting, a pre-war refugee to Britain who has worked his way up through the ranks of the post-war British army and then inveigled his way into a career in British embassy in Bonn before disappearing with forty three top secret files that could cause serious political ructions if they came to light.  Sent to find Harting and the files is Alan Turner, a security officer who is direct, rude, bloody-minded, and working class, who seems to delight in treading on the toes of the senior, upper-class embassy staff.  Le Carre uses Harting’s disappearance and Turner’s investigation to examine a whole series of themes including Britain’s role in post-war Germany, European diplomacy and hypocrisy, the workings of the British foreign services and its classed-riddled structure, German post-war politics, and the thorny relationship between truth, justice, political relations and the ‘greater good’.  The characterisation and the interactions between characters are excellent as Turner slowly forces uncomfortable truths into the open.  In terms of the telling, the tale has a somewhat ponderous start and sometimes drifted into oblique literary asides, however the overall effect is a thoughtful, layered tale, full of subtle digs and twist and turns that has a very nice denouement - it is a thriller with a small t, a battle of wits rather than a swashbuckling, action-adventure.  Overall, a superior spy tale.

Review of Call For The Dead by John Le Carre (1961, Gollancz)

The day after George Smiley interviews and clears Samuel Fennan, a Foreign Office worker, of suspected espionage after an anonymous tip-off, Fennan's found dead having seemingly committed suicide. Smiley's boss at MI5 and the police seem to be content to accept that Fennan took his own life. However, after visiting the scene of death and interviewing Fennan's wife, a concentration camp survivor, Smiley is not convinced and neither is a local policeman, Mendel, who is about to retire. Unwilling to drop his investigation, Smiley quits his job and continues to work at the thin trail. A short time later he is viciously attacked and hospitalised. Undaunted, Smiley and Mendel patiently unravel clues and continue their hunt convinced that there are sinister forces at play.

Call For The Dead was Le Carre's first book and also introduced George Smiley to the reading public. It's a moderately thin read (157 pages) and the plot is relatively straightforward, with no substantive subplots. What marks Le Carre out is his voice and the careful layering and rhythm of the prose. In many ways, the storytelling style of Call for the Dead reminded me of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck series, which was first published a couple of years later, in that the style is social realism (rather than noirish style of American hardboiled or the more swashbuckling style of spy thrillers such as Ian Fleming) and the pace is quite sedate as the story works its way to a somewhat understated climax. Like Martin Beck, Smiley is a fairly ordinary character who works through a case patiently and dogmatically, though he is a little more impetuous and foolhardy, and shares the donnish qualities of Colin Dexter's Morse. I read a number of the Smiley books when I was a teenager and it was interesting to revisit him now, especially since the character I remember was slightly different to the one presented (I thought of him as more enigmatic and calculating). Having looked around on the internet it seems that Smiley's character did mutate a little and his back story and career timeline altered quite substantially between books. He nevertheless remains one of fiction's enduring spy characters.

Call for the Dead

I finished John Le Carre's 'Call for the Dead' at the weekend. It was his first book and introduced George Smiley. There's much to like about the book. One thing that caught my eye was that the back cover blurb which simply states:

Why did a routine security check make Fennan kill himself?

Short, to the point and does the job of piquing a potential reader's interest. There's no longer blurb on the inside either. Quite a refreshing approach.

The book also has some nice philosophical asides. Here are two of them.

What did Hesse write? 'Strangers to wander in the mist, each is alone.' We know nothing of one another, nothing, Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing. How am I judging Elsa Fennan? I think I understand her suffering and her frightened lies, but what do I know of her? Nothing.

He was going to tell Mendel how he had wrestled with Goethe's metamorphoses of plants and animals in the hope of discovering, like Faust, 'what sustains the world at it inmost point'. He wanted to explain why it was impossible to understand nineteenth-century Europe without a working knowledge of the natural sciences, he felt earnest and full of important thoughts, and knew secretly that this was because his brain was wrestling with the day's events, that he was in a state of nervous excitement.