The Honourable Schoolboy

1977's THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is yet another spy novel by David John Moore Cornwell (b. 1931) whose far better known pen name is John Le Carre. Once again aging George Smiley is back in harness with MI-6, British Counter Intelligence or "the Circus" as it is called in the novel. He is patching together again in the 1970s a demoralized, discredited British Spy service after first detecting and neutralizing a Soviet mole. *** Like a good chess player who, proverbially, "learns more from a game he loses than a game he wins," George Smiley analyzes what archenemy Soviet spy master "Karla" was doing at uncharacteristic expense that Karla's English mole felt he had to take desperate but failed measures to prevent seeing the light of day. A money trail, laboriously followed up by Smiley and his favorite in-house English sleuths, leads from Moscow through Laos to Hong Kong. What on earth are the Soviets improbably up to in Britain's largest remaining Crown Colony? *** With excursuses to Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and wartime Viet-Nam, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY gives a worm's eye view of one of Smiley's several unstable agents in the Far East, The Honourable Jerry Westerby. Like almost every other well sketched character in the novel, Westerby's hold on conventional morality is slim. He drinks too much, wenches too much and thinks too little. Yet his bulldog tenacity allows him to uncover key elements of what Soviet master spy Karla was up to in Hong Kong. At novel's end Westerby is trying to protect two aging Chinese brothers from the CIA determined to wrest one of the two away from Smiley and Britain in Britain's very own Hong Kong. *** THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is a large, complex canvas. It is anything but profound. Its characters are almost uniformly dim in cross-cultural understanding. A better than average book this is, with appeal for lovers of Allen Dulles's "the craft of intelligence," or of Hong Kong in the 1970s, and of students of the American defeats in Cambodia and Viet-Nam and appeal for believers that God writes straight with unusually crooked British and Chinese lines. -OOO-