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50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A spy novel you will come back to..., January 25, 2002
I've just finished reading SCHOOLBOY for perhaps the fifth time & find myself enjoying it just as much as I did to begin with. Part of the pleasure of a good LeCarre is the remarkable depth of his characters -the feeling that one is dealing with real people with all their faults and strengths. Beyond this however is the feeling of authenticity that leCarre brings to his landscapes and to his times. Here we can feel that we are actually in London, and Hong Kong, and Cambodia during that strange Spring of 1975 when thirty years of war were finally drawing to their chaotic close. In Smiley LeCarre has created a truly remarkable figure -at once remote in his brilliance and yet at the same time so human in his flaws and failures. here is a man who will read Goethe in the original to his cheating wife, smoke out a Russian spy in China, salvage a failing Secret Service, and yet try & fail to keep to his diet. Jerry Westerby, The Honourable Schoolboy of the title is in many ways the Everyman of the piece, we side with him, root for him, fear for him, and at the end, well I won't give it away! This is a Thinking Person's spy novel that will do just fine as "aeroplane reading" or as a serious glance back at those awful 1970's...
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Le Carre, May 8, 2000
John Le Carre's mistakes (e.g., "Naive and Sentimental Lover") are more interesting than most other writers' crowning achievements, but "Schoolboy" is as good an intrigue and adventure novel as one will ever find. Le Carre is the bravest popular novelist around. He panders to no one's politics; he doesn't care how much work a reader might normally choose to invest in a book; and he adheres to no formulae. You either trust him utterly, and let him take you where he's going, or you read Grisham. "Schoolboy" features a Le Carre regular character, George Smiley, and centers on a bit character from earlier work, Jerry Westerby. In a sense, the novel is a contrast between, on the one hand, the bluff, hearty, athletic, noble, and, well, superficially superficial Westerby; and on the other, the deepest and most complicated character in the genre, George Smiley. But there's so much more here: the contrast between Eastern and Western cultures; between England in its late-twentieth century posture and the then-seeming decline in influence of the U.S.; between the young Turks at the Circus and its old guard. What unites it all is Le Carre's remarkable gift at storytelling, dialogue, and character development. I read many authors in the intrigue, mystery, and crime fields. But they're all just faint echoes of Le Carre. If you want real gold, and not just cheap imitation, he's your man.
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LeCarre, The Thinking Man's Spy Master!, July 31, 2003
Like most of the best-selling works that come from the unchallenged master of the intelligent spy thriller John LeCarre, this is a fictional but absorbing treatise on the hidden and conflicted corners of the human heart, the many ways in which our own natures feed into and extend the darker impulse of a society bent on pursuing the secrets and treachery that ever lurks for the unsuspecting victim. Here, in the second of three best-selling novels tracing the pilgrim's progress of George Smiley, the intrepid and unlikely hero of the post-industrial Western world, LeCarre continues his marvelously convoluted narrative tracing the continuing history of the Smiley chronicles, a three volume spy novel treatise detailing the perfidy and treachery of the world of British intelligence. In "The Honourable Schoolboy", the instrument of Smiley's revenge against the legendary Karla, the Chief of the Soviet espionage effort, is one Jerry Westerby, a man who comprises such an amalgam of honor, evil, and rage that he is perhaps one of the most complex and yet completely believable characters to pop from LeCarre's fertile mind. Westerby is the old hand in the Far East, Smiley's eyes and ears, and the man George has placed to push the first domino spinning toward the eventual collapse of all the others in the vast Soviet spy network. Smiley is spinning the network in the aftermath of the uncovering of a Soviet mole deep within the Circus, the code name within the trade for the center of British Intelligence. As he probes the various aspects of the British network to discover the loci of damage and infiltration, Smiley picks the point of entry as Hong Kong, and no one is better suited to Smiley's complex undertaking that Jerry, a complicated, immensely intelligent, and yet absolutely dangerous and committed cold warrior who can be counted on to go the extra mile for the team and for Britian and the Queen. The plot is ingenious, intricate, and horrific in its human toll, played out against a landscape of the far-flung persons and places of the former British Empire. With Westerby, the `honourable school boy' of the title, we embark on a cautious yet beautifully choreographed adventure into the heart of darkness of ourselves, and we shouldn't be surprised to find some scar tissue and broken bones as we descend deeper into the tortuous caverns we keep hidden in our subconscious realms. LeCarre is nothing if not a superb chronicler of the ways in which our own natures become a battle ground for the struggle between good and evil, the good we can be for others, and the evil we do to them and ourselves by subscribing to ideologies, almost any ideology, that finally forces us to choose between our values and our duty. This is a marvelous book, an entertaining read, and a stunning example of the sophistication, complexity, and sheer intelligence of the author in detailing the subterranean world of international espionage. Enjoy!
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