A review by rc90041
The Honorable Schoolboy by John le Carré

5.0

Just spectacular. The scenes in Cambodia in particular are brilliantly realized: the Charlie Marshall character, as seen piloting a battered DC-4 Carvair, is one of the most memorable I've come across in years. As in other le Carré novels that I've read, the plot developments seem almost purposefully obfuscated at times, but that's part of the pleasure of trying to follow Smiley's methods and thinking, just as all of the other characters in the books seem to be trying to do. The writing is beautiful, at times startlingly so. Le Carré apparently made four trips to Southeast Asia to research this book, and it shows, in the spectacularly vivid scenes set there. Fiction doesn't get much better than this -- in any genre.