In the past I’ve been critical of John le Carré and I have never really understood why he has been held in high esteem. I have questioned whether his popularity is due to his name as it’s easily remembered and so I must admit I approached one of his classics tomes with some trepidation. Even though I hadn’t read The Honourable Schoolboy in about 15 years, I felt like a middle-aged man who has been approached on a social network site by a long forgotten school-friend, and invited out for a drink – full of trepidation as I was sure that there is a reason we have not kept in touch all these years.

This book is not an easy one to enjoy and it’s best read in as few of sittings as possible so that it does not get put down and forgotten.
John le Carré has seemed to write 3 or 4 different stories in this book and the narrative does not remain consistent and so as a reader you fail to get engaged with the story and the characters and by the end you think to yourself what a waste of time that was.

At the start, you think you reading an Emily Bronte meets James Clavell and the language is a bit stilted and unnatural. For instance the hacks at the Hong Kong club are almost speaking Shakespearean, where you would expect the rough as guts, war weary reporters of that era would be using more of a courser and colourful language.

The second story of the book is simply the boring story of an old man, Smiley, who has suffered a bad marriage breakup and is trying to manage this and has been drafted in to his old job. Smiley has confidence issues, tries to re-organise the Service, but he is still obsessed with Karla and surrounds himself with the most dysfunctional characters in spy fiction. Smiley is simply Colin Forbes Tweed without the personality or the team. Would I have enjoyed the book more if there was no Smiley? Hell yes.

The story of the protagonist Westerby and his travels round Asia are Graham Greene-ish without the language skills before he returns to Hong Kong where the story switches to Romeo and Juliet. When Westerby is in Phom Pehn and even though the author mentions it in his introduction that he did similar things, you feel that Carré toured the war zone in a stretch limousine as it all feels a bit disengaged from the action and you don’t feel the heat or the grubbiness of Asia. At no point was any suspense injected into the story making you fear for Westerby’s safety, and his romance and eventual swan song was just dull.

I would like to write more on this book, but I have lost enough time that I will never get back, so here are some bullet points:
Referencing other writers and philosophers – what’s the point? didn’t help the story or the character development
Slowness of the story building up to nothing
Was le Carré getting paid per word as seriously a lot of this was just inane drivel – A good editor could have reduced this book by 90%.
The femme fatale was just stupid (top secret mission for the SIS, but I’ll write to my dad and let him know all about it) and her pilot ex-lover was a waste of words
Not a spy story, but rather a mixture of stories, interspersed with the authors travel anecdotes, with a flimsy spy background.

In summary, John le Carré’s Tailor of Panama was ripped off from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and this time le Carré tries to outdo himself by ripping off both Tai-Pan by James Clavell and The Quiet American by Greene and with the added bonus of a really long boring pointless story on Smiley. This results in a book that has no real structure and no narrative flow. Why he is still regarded as one of the greats still baffles me.

I think I will stop reading le Carré now and maybe let Red Banner do reviews on his books from now on.

For years this has always been the most iconic Cold War book written by the most iconic Cold War author and so yesterday I sat down and re-read it after break of 15 years. Is it “The best spy story I have read” as Graham Greene commented? To me, no. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good book, however I thought of the books reviewed so far on thestasi.com A Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton was better and The Charm School by Nelson DeMille was more entertaining. Graham Greene is doing himself a disservice by putting this book ahead of The Quiet American.

Alec Leamas runs the Berlin office during the height of the Cold War, say roughly 1963, however his agents and their networks are getting rolled up by Hans-Dieter Mundt, head of the Abteilung, the East German Secret Service. Mundt, depicted as a ruthless murdering thug (ex Nazi and Jew hater) is too successful, so Control, the head of MI6, hatches a plan. This plan is to get Leamas to act washed out so that he would appear to be an attractive target for the East Germans to ‘turn’ and through his mis-information he would identify Mundt as a British double agent, thus forcing the East Germans to remove Mundt permanently. It’s a desperate dirty long term plan but one that has to work as there are no assets left in East Germany.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: No hints in this book, however what is good is that instead of the West always fighting a war where their actions are always morally right, this book shows that the British can fight a dirty espionage war too.
Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Greedy capitalist grocer, in the nation of shopkeepers, gets a smack, but I wouldn’t give Leamas credit either. People are shot at the Berlin Wall and a guard gets killed in a dark room.
Believability of the goodies (UK): Alec Leamas is believable as someone who has ran out of time as being a successful operator, however like the spy he once was, he still has the ability to be a good liar and to perform a role. His biggest downfall is that he is getting old and more importantly he believes he is smarter than everybody else, thus he can’t anticipate the real objectives by Control and Mundt and is found wanting when he needs an extraction.
Control could easily exist and I would hope he would exist. I would want the head of my secret service to be a strategic thinker and to do what it takes to protect our country, even if it means getting their hands dirty. I’m not keen on today’s practice of hiring diplomatics or political animals or people stupid enough to appear on facebook.
Elizabeth Gold is Leamas’ love interest in the book. She is a bit of a loner and comes across as a bit of a loser. Believable – why not, people do make daft choices in life.
George Smiley makes a couple of cameo roles.
Believability of the baddies (Abteilung): The victors of World War 2 had no qualms of hiring ex-Nazis as long as they were effective so its perfectly conceivable that Hans-Dieter Mundt has risen through the ranks and became head. However, his character isn’t fully fleshed out in this book, so it isn’t clear why someone who detests Jews so much would have allowed a Jew to become his Number 2, even though he sets him up later.
Ashe & Kievers are the comedy double act of the international spying world whilst Peters came across as a perfunctory agent.
Fiedler is the main opponent in this book and Mundts deputy. I realise that his idealism and his alleged great mind is supposed to make him a brilliant spymaster, however he seemed to be incapable of delving into the murky world of spying and this undone him. He wasn’t sufficiently paranoid to justify his position and was subsequently found out by the SIS and Mundt, therefore I believe he could exist, but not at his seniority.

In summary, the perception that this is the greatest Cold War book ever written by the master of Cold War fiction, but I strongly disagree. I’ve always been confused why Le Carré is so overrated, is it his surname that’s sticks in peoples mind and this has then created a snowball effect? With this book, I found that I struggled to engage with the characters and I have to say that this book stands the test of time as good, but not great, writing.

I want to write a detailed review of this book, but it was so bad in every way that I can’t translate my anger of wasting my time reading this into a proper review. I physically had to hide the pages I was reading when I was on the train incase I was scorned at by my fellow passengers.
The characters were dull, the language was inept, maybe it tried to be too clever and too moral, and I was left wondering if there was a plot, or has one of the most iconic espionage writers now trading on his name and preparing his loyal readers on moving into the Ludlum space where someone else writes the books for him.

I read a review on amazon.com, where you can buy this book, see link below, that “you will love this book or hate it according to your particular political and religious prejudices”. Nonsense – this book is just badly written, its not deep, its doesn’t affect your core beliefs, its just shockingly bad. In fact it is so bad it makes Colin Forbes appear as a supremely gifted wordsmith.
The most joy I had with this book was when I gave it to my 1 year old daughter and she happily ripped out pages as she sat in the back of the car.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: A draw, who cares when is fiction is this bad.
Explosives/fight scenes etc.. :Its missing a nuclear war scene where everybody is incinerated.
Believability of the goodies: Nil
Believability of the baddies: Nil

DC – maybe its time to fade into the greyness and let your pseudonym retire and this book has tested my love for Cold War fiction