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. wasn't entirely convinced about the motivation for the protagonist's course of action in the final chapters. Around 1974 or so, John le Carré had traveled in the company of a journalist throughout Southeast Asia and Hong Kong to capture the feel of the times. The place descriptions are strongly evocative. The speech of Westerby and his journalist colleagues are heavily peppered with the idioms of the decade. Excluding Smiley and his chosen, the characters in this international cast reflect the racist and sexist attitudes of their period (which probably still exists today albeit better masked).

The "schoolboy" of the title, Jerry Westerby, second son of the press baron Lord Westerby, a failed novelist as Smiley is a failed priest, several times married and a guilty father, ex-agent prepared to do his duty -- "You point me andBut I’m also fascinated by the novel’s beginning and ending at a boys’ prep school. One of the spies is sent there to lie low and recover after nearly being killed. These sections are largely told from the perspective of an isolated new student whom the wounded teacher deploys as his assistant and spy. This connection between two loners has the most transformative arc of all the novel’s relationships. Although tangential to the plot, le Carré uses it as a frame, contrasting the easy loyalty of youth with the jaded mistrust of adult men. Those sections read almost like a middle-grade novel, with a brighter tone and sensibility. Le Carré infuses warmth into this harsh cold war tale but, instead of romance, he uses the optimism of intergenerational found family. Popular opinion has it that this is the weakest of the three Karla novels. I thought it was a masterpiece, and a more ambitious novel than Tinker, Tailor. This is the second in John le Carré’s trilogy starring George Smiley as the most important character although the main protagonist is really the man of the title, The Honourable Gerald Westerby, known as Jerry (shouldn’t that be Gerry?) Chronologically, this book follows Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but is complete in itself and the two stories are only loosely connected, so you can read this quite happily if you haven’t read TTSS. Like its predecessor, this is complicated, exciting, incredibly well thought out, difficult to predict and a joy to read.

And the huggermugger is appropriately elaborate. To act is to betray, either the self or someone else, or the past or the idea of civilization. In Smiley's metaphysical scheme, Karla is the great red whale. According to Jerry, as to Ko, one honors Smiley stared at an evening paper, not reading it. In a corner, not twelve feet from him, little Fawn had taken up the baby-sitter's classic position. His dark eyes smiled agreeably on the diners and on the doorway. He lifted his cup with his left hand, while his right idled close to his chest. Did Karla sit like this, Smiley wondered. Did Karla take refuge among the unsuspecting? Why this hasn't been made into a dramatisation is beyond me. Perhaps it is the complex nature of the plot, maybe there just isn't enough goodness in the novel - for the novel displays every weakness of the human condition. Who knows? Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.”Recruited into the "Circus" in the late 1920s, when he might so easily have become an Oxford don, George Smiley spends the 1930s and early 1940s working undercover in Nazi Germany in daily fear of betrayal and death.