The time is 1974/1975, the place, the Far East, mostly Hong Kong, which is still run by the UK. The Americans are losing Vietnam, the war has spilled over into Laos, the Khmer Rouge have almost taken Cambodia, and there is a thriving trade in opium in the region. The People’s Republic of China is known as Red China and is the great power in the region, of course, and is to be feared. Hong Kong itself is a hotbed of money, crime, espionage, fast living and big business. Need Jerry have ever gone to Ricardo in the first place? Would the outcome, for himself, have been different if he had not? Or did Jerry, as Smiley’s defenders to this day insist, by his pass at Ricardo, supply the last crucial heave which shook the tree and caused the coveted fruit to fall?

Once again the core of the plot is a mole planted, this time in China, decades before by Karla, the Soviet counterpart to Smiley, head of the Circus, the British Secret Service. In the previous volume Smiley had unmasked a Karla mole hidden deep in the Circus, but by then serious damage had been done, and Smiley is now charged with restoring the honor of the organization he has cherished his entire life. Smiley again] To be inhuman in defense of our humanity, he had said, harsh in defense of compassion. To be single-minded in defense of our disparity. (460)But the really strength-sapping feature of the prose style is its legend-building tone. Half the time le Carré sounds like Tolkien. You get visions of Hobbits sitting around the fire telling tales of Middle Earth.

urn:oclc:796091406 Scandate 20090723183144 Scanner scribe9.rich.archive.org Scanningcenter rich Source That's in addition to laying a new cornerstone in British spy fiction. You may as well consider it the most fully-formed, most mature, & most robust espionage novel yet produced in English literature. For that's what it is. This is the lone title to judge all others by. Previously, that torch was held by Somerset Maugham, or Greene, or LeCarre himself. But now, only Len Deighton's ' Game, Set, Match,' series (a trilogy, mind you) can favorably compare in depth and breadth to just this one, extraordinary LeCarre masterpiece. One day, thought Guillam, as he continued listening, one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a tough act to follow, but I must admit I was expecting more. At first, I thought that’s exactly what I was getting but then the mind-numbing second third happened and I was lost in a way I never was in Tinker Tailor. I still don’t have a clear understanding of what happened—in the book or with my interest in it. laundered and pouring into Hong Kong. Surely this is the work of Karla, the super spymaster of Moscow Centre. But what is he buying?Beautifully written and expertly plotted, it also takes a razor sharp scalpel to snobbery and the British class system, and has a pleasingly authentic and complex psychological dimension. Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.”

To start with, this book has little connection with the Karla-Smiley story of Tinker, Tailor. Yes, Karla is mentioned as linked to the spies being chased but with no other role whatsoever. Smiley team is there but more as a sideshow to the juvenile story of a fringe spy falling in crazy love over a single meeting, his Southeast Asian ventures and a complex capture tale where one is never clear what the entire fuss is all about.A common complaint against Le Carre is that he writes women poorly, which I agree with -- to an extent. I would argue that he has little interest in people who don't lead double lives, male or female, and reserves his awesome descriptive powers for people who are hiding something. Which, in this book, encompasses nearly everyone we meet, with the notable exception of the beautiful blonde Brit Elizabeth (though her parents, in a short scene painful to read, are well-rendered). Le Carré used to be famous for showing us the bleak, tawdry reality of the spy’s career. He still provides plenty of bleak tawdriness, but romanticism comes shining through. Jerry Westerby, it emerges, has that “watchfulness” which “the instinct” of “the very discerning” describes as “professional.” You would think that if Westerby really gave off these vibrations it would make him useless as a spy. But le Carré does not seem to notice that he is indulging himself in the same kind of transparently silly detail which Mark Twain found so abundant in Fenimore Cooper. The second volume in le Carre's fabled Karla spy trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy is a significant departure from the five Smiley books leading up to it. It's the longest of all the Smiley novels, and the only one where the action takes place outside of Europe.

Peter Guilliam sums it up rather well, I thought, and in doing so lays out the basic premise of the entire book:While the Americans are adding another five metres of concrete to the Embassy roof, and the soldiers are crouching in capes under their trees, and the journalists are drinking whisky, and the generals are at the opium houses, the Khmer Rouge will come out of the jungle and cut our throats. (346)