A review by nigellicus
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense

5.0

This was my first LeCarre. I think I was sixteen. I loved the writing, the characters, the setting. I didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. The story was too complex, the real-world politics and conflicts utterly beyond me. And yet, I sat in the bus in freezing cold evening eating dry-roasted peanuts and immersed myself in world as alien to me as Middle Earth, more alien, because I knew it was really my world, to which I was an alien, and which completely defeated my comprehension. 

Now I think it's an amazing book, the second in a trilogy, about the crumbling of a dreadful old world order and the establishment of a newer, even nastier and darker one. Smiley chases one slender thread from the ruins left by the mole Gerald, seeking to redeem and reinvigorate the secret service to which he has devoted his life. Even as he does so, the vultures are circling to snatch it away, and surely he's too canny an operator to be as unaware as he appears. Jerry Westerby is dispatched to Hong Kong to follow the thread, to war-torn Cambodia and Thailand and back, and the moment of triumph is debased with the humanity of his quixotic despair and futility. A bitter, thrilling epic of espionage, that somehow knits together the first and third books depicting Smiley's battles with Karla.