Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Honourable Schoolboy
Despite the disapproval of my favorite graduate school advisor, I have long admired John Le Carre for his imagination and craft. The opening of The Looking-Glass War, for example, is a master class on how to open a novel that is about, as so many of Le Carre's novels are, trying to understand the world from insufficient information. It introduces the subject by providing the reader with more information than the characters will have until the very end (when George Smiley shows up, in what is not a Smiley novel, to enforce reality on the others), thus emphasizing the importance of sufficient data.
The Honourable Schoolboy is, on the other hand, a Smiley novel, and not even Smiley has all the necessary information. It starts not long after Bill Haydon (Smiley's old comrade, Lady Anne Smiley's old lover) has been exposed as a Soviet mole, and the Circus (the otherwise nameless intelligence organization that is the matrix for most of Le Carre's books) is in disarray. Old operatives must be reactivated, including some who were chucked out by Haydon because they were effective and some who were chucked out because they were not. It's hard to tell which are which, sometimes. (Incidentally, I've never worked out a complete chronology of the Smiley books, but this site: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/smiley.html claims to have it.)
That's the espionage background. But a LeCarre novel is never just about espionage. It is about character. First, there is the constant evolution of Smiley, from the wistful retired grass widower of Call For the Dead and A Murder of Quality to the semi-triumphs of the Karla novels, where he finally entraps Haydon, ruptures (apparently irrevocably) the relationship with Anne, and finally lands Karla himself, to the elegies of The Secret Pilgrim. Then there are the portraits of the other spies (and nearly everyone in these books is a spy of some sort). In this case the spy at the heart of the matter is one Jerry Westerby, retired by Haydon but never a full-time agent. He's a journalist becalmed in rural Italy when he gets the call, and he is thrust into the collapsing American war in Southeast Asia to untangle some of Smiley's always massively complex threads.
What Westerby learns in his espionage is fascinating, but what he fails to learn about himself (for he remains, in so many ways, just a schoolboy, despite his approach to middle age) is just as central to the story. It moves forward and back, in flashbacks that show us his entry into the business of espionage while the story is moving him toward his exit. Le Carre might almost have set himself the problem of keeping us interested in a character who doesn't learn much from his experiences. But he does it, and not only by giving us the spy plot. Even though Westerby doesn't change significantly, our perception of him can as we learn more about him. There's a sense, then, in which we become characters in the book, the characters who are changed by the action. Ursula LeGuin managed that in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but that's a short story. Doing it in a novel (even if this is only part of what the novel is doing) is pretty impressive.
dmh
The Honourable Schoolboy is, on the other hand, a Smiley novel, and not even Smiley has all the necessary information. It starts not long after Bill Haydon (Smiley's old comrade, Lady Anne Smiley's old lover) has been exposed as a Soviet mole, and the Circus (the otherwise nameless intelligence organization that is the matrix for most of Le Carre's books) is in disarray. Old operatives must be reactivated, including some who were chucked out by Haydon because they were effective and some who were chucked out because they were not. It's hard to tell which are which, sometimes. (Incidentally, I've never worked out a complete chronology of the Smiley books, but this site: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/smiley.html claims to have it.)
That's the espionage background. But a LeCarre novel is never just about espionage. It is about character. First, there is the constant evolution of Smiley, from the wistful retired grass widower of Call For the Dead and A Murder of Quality to the semi-triumphs of the Karla novels, where he finally entraps Haydon, ruptures (apparently irrevocably) the relationship with Anne, and finally lands Karla himself, to the elegies of The Secret Pilgrim. Then there are the portraits of the other spies (and nearly everyone in these books is a spy of some sort). In this case the spy at the heart of the matter is one Jerry Westerby, retired by Haydon but never a full-time agent. He's a journalist becalmed in rural Italy when he gets the call, and he is thrust into the collapsing American war in Southeast Asia to untangle some of Smiley's always massively complex threads.
What Westerby learns in his espionage is fascinating, but what he fails to learn about himself (for he remains, in so many ways, just a schoolboy, despite his approach to middle age) is just as central to the story. It moves forward and back, in flashbacks that show us his entry into the business of espionage while the story is moving him toward his exit. Le Carre might almost have set himself the problem of keeping us interested in a character who doesn't learn much from his experiences. But he does it, and not only by giving us the spy plot. Even though Westerby doesn't change significantly, our perception of him can as we learn more about him. There's a sense, then, in which we become characters in the book, the characters who are changed by the action. Ursula LeGuin managed that in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but that's a short story. Doing it in a novel (even if this is only part of what the novel is doing) is pretty impressive.
dmh
