Nick Baam's Blog - Posts Tagged "baam"
Applause, applause, M. le Carre
Crime noir been given its due, with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain all winning Nobel prizes (haven't they?) (read Cain's Serenade), I nominate for the award the spy genre's only serious candidate, John le Carre. More, I nominate The Honourable Schoolboy as the best spy novel ever written, and the author himself doesn't put it in his top four.
The Honourable Schoolboy, second in the Karla Trilogy, coming after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and before Smiley's People, is all about Jerry Westerby. (And who's ever been as good with names as le Carre? Jerry Westerby. George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Ricki Tarr. Karla. Uncle Benny in The Tailor of Panama.) Westerby, trying the whole book to live down that ordinary and so unspylike name and by doing so becomes one of literature's great tragic figures: a spy in over his head; a half-baked spy (a failed newspaperman!) in love.
Elegant and masterly throughout, the highlight is Smiley's crushing visit to Lizzie Worth's parents. ('My little Lizzie went behind the hedge with half of Asia before she found her Drake. But she found him.') No bullets anywhere, but victims abound, including Smiley.
Add to this mix the man's extraordinary longevity and his personal courage and integrity, his willingness to take on the right enemies absolutely, and ladies and gentlemen I nominate for the Nobel Prize for Literature M. le Carre.
NB
And Westerby's brilliant by-way-of-introduction in the book... saved by the sneering student at a post-Westerby Circus lecture ... textbook le Carre.
The Honourable Schoolboy, second in the Karla Trilogy, coming after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and before Smiley's People, is all about Jerry Westerby. (And who's ever been as good with names as le Carre? Jerry Westerby. George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Ricki Tarr. Karla. Uncle Benny in The Tailor of Panama.) Westerby, trying the whole book to live down that ordinary and so unspylike name and by doing so becomes one of literature's great tragic figures: a spy in over his head; a half-baked spy (a failed newspaperman!) in love.
Elegant and masterly throughout, the highlight is Smiley's crushing visit to Lizzie Worth's parents. ('My little Lizzie went behind the hedge with half of Asia before she found her Drake. But she found him.') No bullets anywhere, but victims abound, including Smiley.
Add to this mix the man's extraordinary longevity and his personal courage and integrity, his willingness to take on the right enemies absolutely, and ladies and gentlemen I nominate for the Nobel Prize for Literature M. le Carre.
NB
And Westerby's brilliant by-way-of-introduction in the book... saved by the sneering student at a post-Westerby Circus lecture ... textbook le Carre.
