The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré

Ok, so, yes.

Right.

I also read this weeks ago and am only now catching up (see previous post on my busy August.)

Here goes:

I spent a lot of time in June and July watching through the TV series Slow Horses. I enjoyed it a lot, and was intrigued to explore its source material. But, after seeing a paperback copy of the book it is based on, every literary instinct in me told me that the cover design was so abrasive and unappealing that the content must be shit, and certainly not something to countenance unless/until I’ve had a good run of quality books.¹

So I didn’t read the novel Slow Horses, no way, instead I decided to return to the oeuvre of arguably the second best British spy novelist of all time. No, not John Gardner – John Le Carré.

If you haven’t seen Slow Horses (and literally no one I’ve mentioned it to other than the person I live with seems to have done so (I didn’t watch it with my partner, Christ no, we don’t do that, get a life)), but you have read some John Le Carré, it’s easy to imagine as it’s kinda similar.

Gary Oldman plays a guy who is basically George Smiley – he is ugly, unslick, repulsive to the government-adjacent careerists at the heart of the secret service, but absolutely bloody brilliant…

Oldman’s “Jackson Lamb” (all the characters have conspicuously fictional names) is a side-lined guy who runs a little posse of MI5 misfits (too annoying, too drunk, too gambling addicted, too pissed-off-the-wrong-person, but all too competent/functional/connected to be fired without severance pay) who constantly end up getting stuck in the middle of interdepartmental and intra-governmental scandals, adventures and dangers. It is always, in the world of Slow Horses, shadows of past (or present) intelligence errors and the scattergun attempts to hide these away that form the major problems and narratives. Which feels kinda familiar…²

That said, there’s a lot more flatulence there than in the works of John Le Carré.

And, of course, in The Honourable Schoolboy – I believe the longest of Le Carré’s books prior to the point in time in the 1990s when famous novelists didn’t get edited down any more – George Smiley has done something inconceivable for Gary Oldman’s character in that acclaimed Apple TV+ (that’s why you haven’t seen it) series: George Smiley is now running the UK’s most important intelligence agency.

Yes, Smiley, here, is the boss.

–///–

Although George Smiley recurs in a lot of Le Carré’s books (and, it seems, some written by his (greedy(?)) son, Nick Harkaway), having dipped into many of those over the past few decades, I have never before got the impression that I was reading a series of novels telling the life of a singular person or institution… A reader can drop in and out of those self-contained works (at least that has been my experience) with the familiar character little more than a pleasant thing to recognise… That isn’t the case here.

The Honourable Schoolboy is, rather, a direct sequel to the well-known (and made into a m-m-m-movie also starring Gary Oldman) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is all about the search for a mole deep within the heart of the British intelligence services.

That discovery has, understandably, resulted in chaos, due to the exposure of one of the most senior figures of “The Circus” as a Russian asset. Smiley – known to not have been corrupted – is now running the show as everyone attempts to recalibrate, reset and move on. 

Huge volumes of staff were fired due to the potential risk of them also being spies or, at least, incorrectly vetted due to the person who hired them working against British best interest…

The walls of offices are being smashed apart and not repaired due to searches for listening and recording devices placed there by the former double agent, and years of files and investigations are being checked over in order to find where, when and how the influence of the mole was felt in three particular directions: 1) disinformation that was disseminated to the British, 2) British secrets that were likely shared with the Russians and 3) – and this is what the novel is about – looking for the places where this senior, disloyal, employee stopped investigations into Russian actions that might have led to important discoveries.

Oh, and they also have to try to rehire all of the definitely brilliant (but more junior) people who the mole fired because he was worried they might notice his duplicity or would be too good at working against Russia.

The novel, then, is about an agency in disarray, full of self-disgust and shame. The agency – and the UK in general – is no longer trusted by its former allies.

The agency needs a win. The agency wants a win. A big, international, win.

So, finding documents listing the beginning of a very promising investigation into large sums of money being moved around the Far East that almost certainly began in the coffers of the KGB, Smiley assembles a crack team to delve deep into the scant details still remaining on file.

One of the members of the team is the titular “Honourable Schoolboy”, who is an “occasional” intelligence team asset, the aristo son of a failed press baron whose paper collapsed in financial scandal.

This “occasional” spy is also an “occasional” [fake] journalist and he is a boyish 40/50 year old who – at the start of the novel – has landed in Tuscany with the intention of finally writing the novel he’s been tinkering with for years, accompanied by a shockingly young mistress, who he met while she was living homeless in the local village.

The manuscript barely worked on at all, he is summoned back to The Circus and George Smiley himself, relieved to return to espionage and forget about literature and precarious love affair. This man-boy (boy-man?) is sent to Hong Kong, but bounces around Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, on the trail of a Chinese oligarch who may – or may not – have been compromised by the Russians. As the plot thickens, he increasingly (and unhelpfully) begins to feel his true task is “rescuing” the beautiful, English, mistress of the super-rich, organised-crime and KGB-connected magnate, losing sight of what is helpful both to his employer (the British government) and to himself.

An unnamed omniscient narrator occasionally pops up with comments on the progressing narrative – “this was when he made his first bad decision”, “this was when Smiley should have pulled him back to England”, “this is when it should have been obvious that his motives had switched” (not direct quotations) – and forewarns of a coming tragedy, or a coming failure… This is fun, and adds a tone of sour squalor even when actions seem, on the surface, noble and unobtrusive…

–///–

This novel is, as most of Le Carré’s thrillers are, about the ways in which institutions forget that they are peopled by individuals.

It is about how personal greed, or personal lust, or personal narratives around needing to feel like a saviour, are inherent risks when expecting – and needing – people to act without empathy towards individuals they encounter.

Sources are tortured to death. Vehicles are fitted with bombs. Tricks are attempted and truths are hidden. Lies slide and swing around the world and “the honourable schoolboy” does nothing but what he thinks is the best thing to do, which stops being “follow orders” and instead becomes a confused attempt to follow what he thinks is his heart but is probably his dick.

It’s a long novel, yes, and it’s tightly plotted with machinations and twists and turns, and though I picked it up so that I’d have something guaranteed to last me the train ride to and from Edinburgh a few weeks ago, it lasted me another week beyond that, too, as it really is quite a large thriller.

But it’s engaging throughout, and its exploration of sleaze and corruption and the normalised (for the 1970s) expectations of relentless sexual impropriety from middle aged white men sent to the Far East for work is stark in its bluntness: everyone here is horny, everyone behaves badly… except for Smiley, but his lack of peccadilloes, as we all know, is a separate tragedy in itself…

The Honourable Schoolboy is fun, it’s tense, it’s sharp, it’s about corruption and self-denial, it’s about lies and incompatible realities and ideas. It’s about international relations and the American withdrawal from Vietnam… It’s about journalism and organised crime and competing allies, it’s about shame and regret and doomed dreams of redemption…

It’s also a classic of the genre, so everyone knows what they’re getting by this point, don’t they?

---

1. As any brief browse of TriumphOfTheNow.com will tell you, I am partial to a bit of trash fiction. But not now. Not right now. ↩︎
2. Because that’s what Le Carré novels are like… ↩︎