John  Le  Carre
THE  HONOURABLE  SCHOOLBOY
1977

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

(1) biblio.com

Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * *

review:

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-

http://www.biblio.com/books/434616155.html
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(2) lunch.com  07/06/2011

name of review:   The "muddled saintliness" of  Britain's fading Secret Service

rating: * * *

review:

John Le Carre's 1977 spy thriller THE HONOURABLE SCHOOL BOY is a slightly better than average but otherwise quite forgettable novel. Set in the mid 1970s in Britain, Laos, Cambodia, Viet-Nam, China and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOL BOY is far below Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN when it comes to the VIet-Nam war. It offers both less good spycraft and less compelling action than Le Carre's own THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or A  SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY.

Who will look up THE HONOURABLE SCHOOL BOY in order to read it? I suggest
(1) Le Carre fans who have to revel in every paragraph ever written by the still llving author -- real name David John Moore Cornwell (b. 1931);

(2) people who like me (1964 - 1966) lived and worked in Hong Kong and/or Viet-Nam;

(3) readers keen to understand America's growing and largely losing role in East Asia in the 1960s-1970s;

(4) people keen to understand what the CIA's Allen Dulles called "the craft of intelligence."

I cannot imagine many readers highly rating THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY high in any of the four categories just listed.
The plot:

Legendary British Secret Service spymaster George Smiley comes out of retirement in order to unmask a hidden Soviet agent (mole) within the British Service. That done, he then cleans the stable of a riddled, demoralized British spy service. After his flushing out of mole Bill Haydon (among other things Smiley's wife's cousin and sometime lover), Smiley and a small trusted inner circle of agents based in London unravel the deep secret that Haydon had been desperate to make stay secret. That secret? Karla, Smiley's opposite number in Soviet Intelligence, had funneled up to $500,000 to an account in Vientiane, Laos which ended up in a trust fund in Hong Kong. Why? What was Karla up to? Why did Haydon take so many risks to protect what was happening?

Are the Soviets trying to launch an anti-China operation into China from Hong Kong? A key figure in answering this question is the Honourable Clive Gerald Westerby, a sometime British field agent involuntarily retired to a small villa in Italy, where the local postmistress and others call him "the Schoolboy." Smiley reinstates Westerby and sends him to Hong Kong where he is instrumental in finding out who was receiving Karla's money. Two Chinese brothers come to light, both long ago befriended in Shanghai by a Baptist missionary and his wife. At novel's end, Westerby, "the Honourable Schoolboy" is trying to shield one of those brothers from being snatched up by the American CIA. If the CIA succeeds, the nature of the British Service will change, becoming a mere tail wagged by the CIA dog. And Smiley's monumental achievements will all be for naught, at least so far as British self-esteem goes.

The novel's characters are at least twenty too many for cohesion of its needlessly complicated and often boring plot. A brief girlfriend of womanizer "Jerry" Westerby, for instance, materializes in Italy, soon disappears and nevermore plays a role. The book is laden with cliches and saws about politics, religion, spycraft and intelligence and much more.  A couple of samples:
-- One of the two Chinese brothers in Hong Kong suspected of being a Soviet spy, but is and will likely remain highly prized by the colony's Governor. How will he likely end up some day in the British pecking order? "Poor chap. Still, he's on his way, I suppose. He'll work his way up, same as we all do" (Ch. 8)

-- Many Scots came East to spread the British Empire. They "plundered the coast six days of the week and prayed to Calvin on the seventh" (Ch. 9). (If you ever meet a Calvinist (e.g., Presbyterian or Baptist, who ever "prayed to Calvin," please let me know.)

The "muddled saintliness" of  Britain's fading Secret Service was a term applied by the novel's unnamed narrator to Smiley's London spy "Circus" and all of its overseas agents. Muddled, yes, they are. Saintliness, where is it? Show me.

This story I found barely credible and with far too many characters for its essentially thin plot. Take it or leave it, as you choose. There are no special insights that stay with me into East Asia, the craft of spying, the human condition, into politics, religion or cross-cultural understanding. In THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY all is surface.

-OOO-

http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/book/UserReview-The_Honourable_Schoolboy-
74-1575816-209970-The_muddled_saintliness_of_Britain_s_fading.html
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(3) bn.com 07/07/2011

title of review: "old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors."

rating: * * *

review:

David John Moore Cornwell (b. 1931), better known as John Le Carre, has written better spy thrillers than THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY (1977). Think of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY. THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is a tired, average fictional portrayal of a tired, uncertain, no longer great Britain carrying on in the mid-1970s Rudyard Kipling's "great game" against Russia of the glory years of Queen Victoria. That game has been portrayed deftly and in several hundred fewer pages in Kipling's KIM than in Le Carre's 1977 ho hum tale of Brits versus Russkis in Hong Kong and its East Asian neighborhood.

At novel's beginning in 1973 the great Russian spymaster Karla has nearly wrecked Britain's famed secret service ("the Circus"). Playing an intelligent, conscientious but plodding Sherlock Holmes to Karla's evil genius, the UK's George Smiley is called out of retirement to plug massive leaks to the Soviets masterminded for decades by Kim Philby-reminiscent Bill Haydon, a mole risen high within London's Circus. Smiley outs Haydon, his wife Anne's cousin and sometime lover, clears up the mess caused by Karla and works to learn whatever lessons he can by "backtracking" Karla. What had Karla been up to that caused mole Haydon to take such desperate measures to keep it from being discovered? 

In a few weeks, on the basis of plodding intelligence work by a small trusted core of Smiley devotees and overseas field agents of the Circus, Smiley finds that Karla has funneled the huge (for Karla) sum of $500,000 to a trust fund in Hong Kong. Is the USSR planning to use that largest remaining gem of the once mighty British Empire to launch operations against Red China? What is the role of two Swatownese brothers, one a free-wheeling, amoral capitalist in the Crown Colony and the other possibly a high ranking Soviet mole in China? This is what THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is about.

Aristocratic, womanizing, morally flawed Clive Gerald (Jerry) Westerby is "The Honourable Schoolboy," a name given to him by the postmistress of the small Italian community where he lives in retirement from the Circus. Westerby, an experienced agent, had been sidelined by mole Haydon and is resuscitated by Smiley and sent to East Asia as part of the Circus's anti-Karla effort to rehabilitate itself. It takes a mere five chapters to learn Westerby's full name.

Jerry Westerby proves a rogue elephant, impossible for his mentor George Smiley to keep from running amok. As much as anything, the sprawling THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is about the differing world views of two tired old spies: Smiley and Westerby, neither's views possessing much depth or relevance to the collapsing pro-Western regimes of 1970s Viet-Nam, Laos and Cambodia or Hong Kong, soon to be reabsorbed into China.

A medium large theme of this novel is the bureaucratic maneuvering by which America's CIA pushes aside the British Secret Service in its own colony, Hong Kong. It is the CIA, not Smiley's Circus, that in the end takes decisive action against Karla's bad guy. This is a novel of an aging British Empire and its aging, worn down spies, being overwhelmed by legions of fresh young better paid American secret agents. THE HONOURABLE SCHOOL BOY is about flagging Britain and ground down British patriots.  It is a tale about when "old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors" (Ch. 11). -OOO-


recommended reading:

-- Graham Greene - THE QUIET AMERICAN

-- John Le Carre - A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.


http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review
.aspx?reviewid=1733747

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(4) amazon.com 07/07/2011

Review Title: "give yourself or withhold yourself ... but never lend yourself."

Reviewer's Rating:  * * *  AVERAGE

Review:

Unfortunately for me, I picked up John Le Carre's 1977 spy novel THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY at a friend's house in Pennsylvania for bedtime reading. I say "unfortunately" because not many days earlier I had read a far better, far shorter British spy yarn, Rudyard Kipling's 1900 novel KIM. Moreover I was slowly working my way through Kipling's 1888 collection of 40 short stories of British India, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS.

And Le Carre's retelling of the last days of non-Communist South Viet-Nam, Laos and Cambodia also put me in mind of Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN -- also shorter and far better than THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY.

I think that turning THE HONOURBLE SCHOOLBOY over to either Greene or Kipling for rewrite (as novel or loosely connected short stories) would have preserved Le Carre's few nuggets worth saving while tossing out the greater than 50% of the text that is sheer ballast, bombast, or red herrings.

Consider Le Carre's plot: two Chinese brothers named Drake and Nelson Ko took a different turn in World War II Shanghai. The older, Drake Ko, drafted into the army of Chiang Kai Shek, set in motion a life of capitalistic derring-do that would by the early 1970s make him a Hong Kong billionaire. The younger brother, Nelson, had fled the invading Japanese to Chungking where he indulged his taste for Communist literature. He would later be sent to Leningrad for a university degree and be recruited there by Karla, nom de guerre of a Soviet master spy much feared by the British. Tycoon Drake, working with Soviet paymasters, creates a Hong Kong trust fund into which flows $500,000 to be used to smuggle Nelson to Hong Kong away from his fickle Chinese Communist masters.

In the course of the novel's flailing around by both the British Secret Service and the American CIA, the two spy agencies determine to lay hands on Nelson when he comes out of China by fishing junk to a small barren Hong Kong island during a religious festival. British spymaster George Smiley is supposed to call all the shots but is outmaneuvered by both his British colleagues and the Americans and things do not go as Smiley would have wished.

There is also misadventure, largely due to rogue with a conscience Smiley agent in Hong Kong, the Honourable Clive Gerald Westerby, called by his Italian neighbors where he lives in retirement at novel's beginning "the honourable schoolboy."

The plot is too simple to bear so much weight, so many, many characters, so much blundering about and so little moral character.

Curiously, both Smiley's inner circle in London and Westerby in Hong Kong unearth, by very different routes, an important personal relationship between the Ko brothers and a pre- and post-World War II English Baptist minister in Shanghai. Reverend Mr Hibbert, now 81 in 1974, had befriended the orphaned Ko brothers from Swatow in the 1930s. He gave the young seafarers names of English admirals, Drake and Nelson. Both starving boys at once became "rice bowl" Christians. But Rev. Hibbert's Christianity took a deeper, lifelong hold on Drake than on Nelson, the budding Communist. Drake also regarded Mrs Hibbert as his second mother.

To me personally, the loving, admiring and admired impact of Reverend Hibbert and wife and their daughter Doris on the Ko brothers is the most enduring element of THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY. At one point in 1949 Nelson Ko reluctantly leads a gang of Red thugs to destroy Hibbert's mission. The Hibberts immediately clean things up. So do both Drake and Nelson Ko. Later Rev. Hibbert gives Drake a reference that facilitates Drake's admission to study law in London. Rev. Hibbert sees the good in both Nelson and Drake and can forgive Communist idealism in the service of a purer, more just China. But after the 1949 raid he turns on his long-time assisant Daisy Fong who had simply stood by and watched the bully boys' desecration with joy in her eyes. Hibbert saw at once: "She was one of them in her heart. Happy." Instantly, Hibbert said:

"'Daisy,' I said, 'Pack your things and go. In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you're worse than a spy" (Ch. 11).

Much of the rest of THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is tedious, repetitive rubbish. What Kipling could have done in eight pages with the Ko Brothers and the Hibberts! How much more prominent would religious influence have been noted by Graham Greene! Still, John Le Carre did the best he could.

-OOO-


http://www.amazon.com/Honourable-Schoolboy-Novel-John-Carre/product-reviews/
0143119737/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
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(5) epinions.com  07/08/2011

Review Title: British Master Spy George Smiley: "inhuman in defence of our humanity"
by aohcapablanca, Jul 08 '11

Product rating: * * * (Average)

John Le Carre's 1977 spy novel, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, tells many stories, too many stories for narrative cohesion, in my opinion.
 
The best story within a story is, I submit, the effort of Hong Kong Chinese billionaire Drake Ko to sneak his hitherto staunchly Communist brother Nelson Ko out of Red China, where he has risen to considerable prominence in the Party since World War II.

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY (virtually meaningless sobriquet of aristocratic Clive Gerald Westerby, a British spy sent to Hong Kong to investigate the Ko brothers) lumbers through 22 long chapters and, depending on your edition, 500 - 600 pages. Rudyard Kipling or Graham Greene could have spun a tauter, better yarn in 300 fewer pages. This is, at times, one tedious novel.

This spy thriller also dances superficially across South Viet-Nam (events preceding the fall of Saigon) and the collapse of the American positions in Laos and Cambodia. At times morally petty British spy master George Smiley goes after the Ko brothers largely because Nelson Ko's Soviet handler, Karla, has come close to destroying the British Secret Service ("the Circus") through a Kim Philby-like mole Bill Haydon recruited before World War II. Don't blame Nelson Ko, Smiley, for the Circus's slip-ups!

Older brother Drake Ko wants to spirit his beloved younger brother Nelson out of China for purely fraternal and family reasons. Smiley and his American CIA counterpart allegedly want to lay hands on Nelson Ko and milk him dry of hard to get at facts about Red China's maritime activities.

Curiously, Smiley's agent in Hong Kong "Jerry" Westerby from an early point in the narrative comes intuitively and emphathetically to grasp the Kos as human beings with the right to be happy. Smiley goes over increasingly to something like morally indefensible revenge, using Nelson Ko simply to show Karla that the Circus's British spy network is not to be counted out by Moscow.

It is the clumsy sketching of moral and religious aspects of the Kos and their flushing out by the Circus and the CIA in Hong Kong that is virtually all that is worth reading in THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY. Both orphaned brothers, from a seafaring clan in coastal Swatow, had been befriended in pre-World War II Shanghai by Reverend Mr Hibbert, now 81 in 1974. Hibbert is a kindly, non-fanatical English Baptist missionary and with his wife, and after the War with the couple's growing daughter Doris, bestows kindness, English language training and 5:00 p.m. tea on Drake and Nelson Ko.

Orphaned Drake Ko, the ruthless billionaire capitalist, worshipped Mrs Hibbert, a German Lutheran named Liese. Much is made in the 70s by spys watching Drake Ko of his calling a beautiful English mistress Elizabeth Worth "Liese."

At novel's end we are shown a curious letter sent by George Smiley to his aristocratic, man-crazy wife, Lady Anne. There Smiley explains that he had chosen spying as a careet

"because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest to my country's goal. ... Today ... I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. ... These people terrify me, but I am one of them" (Ch. 22).

Earlier, Smiley's right-hand man had reflected:
"Guillam recalled what Smiley said in an off-the-record chat with senior British intelligence officers. This was their dilemma:  "To be inhuman in defence of our humanity ... harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity" (Ch. 19).

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is divided into two parts: 

-- (I) "Winding the Clock"
and
-- (II) "Shaking the Tree."

Both sub-titles are apt metaphors for what John Le Carre is laying out. His is a world of improbably flawed human beings, with the notable exception of Rev. Mr. Hibbert and his family and the sometimes slight but enduring Christian impact they made on the brothers Drake and Nelson Ko (Rev. Hibbert had given the the young seafarers English names -- of two prominent English admirals).

I read THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY because I remembered reading decades ago better Le Carre spy novels such as THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY and TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER SPY. I also read it to see if my personal wartime experience as a junior American diplomat in Hong Kong and Viet-Nam tracked those of Le Carre's characters. I would like to flatter myself that I dug more deeply below the surface of Chinese and Viet-Namese cultures than Le Carre or his generally underwhelming men and women. But who can say?

-OOO-

Pros:
A Baptist missionary makes an enduring impact on two unlikely Chinese brothers. War-time East Asia.

Cons:
Far too long in the telling. Plodding spy work. Cliche-ridden. Superficial.

The Bottom Line:
Despite exertion, I got very little from THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY. Rudyard Kipling's KIM, is a better spy novel. Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN, brought Viet-Nam better to life.

Overall Product Rating: * * *   AVERAGE

Recommended: NO!

http://www0.epinions.com/review/John_Le_Carre_The_Honourable_Schoolboy
_epi/content_556528995972
 

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