Books THE SPY’S THE LIMIT

The thriller writer has an amazingly easy job. Most of his readers have lives filled with dirty socks and chocolate-covered children, so they come to his work at the end of the day with all the critical acuteness of an astigmatic mole. All we want is a good illusion and a touch of warmth. We’re suckers for a good story. (That’s why I’ve seen Star Wars three times and would go again if the ticket taker hadn’t snickered the last time I sidled in.)

But this year’s thrillers have been a depressing crop. A few old dependable writers have churned out hack pieces and a few of the promising new writers of last year have reappeared with their promise all dried up. But there’s one bright light undimmed, creating a stir not only among thriller lovers but also in the snootier world of literary criticism.



The Honourable Schoolboy, by John Le Carre (Knopf. S10.95).

No doubt about it. Le Carre is a master. More than just a good spy story – and it’s a very good one – Schoolboy deserves treatment as serious literature, as did the book to which it’s a sequel. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Both are stories of the British Secret Service, called “the Circus” by its initiates. Both feature the tubby, commonplace, sad, lonely, brilliant George Smiley in duel with Karla, the Russian spy-master. And both go beyond the format of the thriller into a serious and complex treatment of human relationships and responsibilities.

In Tinker, Tailor, Smiley started out adrift – deserted by Anne, his beautiful, aristocratic, and hitherto sporadically faithful wife, and forced into retirement from the Circus. Brought back into service to search out a traitor, Karla’s mole hidden in the Circus hierarchy, he succeeds in discovering the cause of his unhappiness, his old friend who is both Anne’s lover and Karla’s agent.

Schoolboy begins with Smiley, now ringmaster of the Circus, bringing to light intelligence on the Russian plot Karla’s mole tried to obliterate from the Circus’ files. But a power-play within the Circus retires Smiley once again to his Bayswater flat, where we find him “most likely in his dressing-gown, either clearing up plates or preparing food he didn’t eat.”

The apparent circularity of the two novels is deceptive. In Tinker, Tailor the machinations of Karla and his agent cut Smiley off from his fellows. In The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley himself does the cutting. Though Anne has returned to him, he leaves her and moves into his office at the Circus. From there, like the choreographer who doesn’t dance himself, he directs other men through the intricacies of his plot. He sends Jerry Westerby, a sometime journalist who’s been not-working on a novel, to Hong Kong, where Westerby blackmails a scared little banker into revealing details of Karla’s secret account. Using his old reporter friends as cover, Westerby lures Smiley’s antagonists into the open. In the process, the Chinese banker and a reporter die violently.

To Smiley, the dead men are only pawns in the game, but to Westerby they’re horribly real. Westerby emerges as “the honourable schoolboy,” a foil to Smiley, the spy-master. Rejecting his own role as pawn, Westerby tries to save the last image of human values he possesses, Lizzie Worth-ington. a beautiful, frightened woman – a middle-class Anne.

Le Carré underscores the parallels between Smiley and Westerby, Lizzie and Anne, in a beautifully written passage:



It is also tempting, but unreasonable, to expect of Smiley that with so many other pressures on him… he should have drawn the inference closest to his own lonely experience; namely that Jerry . . . had wandered the night pavements till he found himself standing outside the building where Lizzie lived, and hung about, as Smiley did [outside Anne’s window], without exactly knowing what he wanted, beyond the off chance of a sight of her … It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume they have no counterparts.

Smiley has chosen his own end and subordinated everything to it, waiting, watching, and knowing that Westerby will lead him precisely where he wants to go. His understanding of Westerby’s behavior condemns Smiley, who in his egoism can’t see Westerby as another lonely man.

Even Smiley’s enemy, Karla, has become a shadowy figure in Schoolboy, whereas in Tinker, Tailor one could feel him working behind the scenes. Smiley has a picture of Karla on his office wall, but it is a blurred, shadowy photograph that could really be anybody. Smiley has chosen to battle a phantom rather than to involve himself with people. At the end of the novel, we see Smiley as he sees himself: “All I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by … These people terrify me, but I am one of them.”

Not as tightly plotted as Tinker, Tailor, Schoolboy is full of wonderful vignettes. In the course of his investigations Smiley interviews people extraneous to the plot and we are given momentary images of people touching, recognizing kinships before each is hurled back into the chaos of his own experience. These seeming digressions underline the main thematic statement of The Honourable Schoolboy: that for one man to manipulate another is the most human of sins. Human, because we’re all trapped inside ourselves; a sin because we deny this kinship, setting ourselves somehow above our brothers, who are our only salvation.



Ruling Passion, by Reginald Hill (Harper & Row, $8.95).

Hill is a promising newcomer to the mystery scene. His young CID sergeant sets out from Scotland Yard to visit some old friends and finds three murdered and one missing. Refusing, in a most unpolice-man-like manner, to accept the obvious conclusion, he gradually unveils the intrigue and complex relationships that exist in a seemingly peaceful English village.

Hill’s strong point is his characters. They’re vivid, human and charmingly eccentric. Although he starts off with a stark, basic mystery plot, he gradually becomes entangled in a welter of sub-plots. Drawing them all together at the close stretches both his ability and the reader’s credulity. Ruling Passion emerges as not quite under control.

The Man from Lisbon, by Thomas Gif-ford (McGraw-Hill, $9.95).

After his The Wind Chill Factor and The Cavanaugh Quest, I had high hopes of Gifford. But The Man from Lisbon is just one of those long novels you keep reading because you want to know what happens, but with a vague hunger gnawing at you all the way. All it amounts to is a good caper, padded out by a trivial, unconvincing love triangle. It’s “soon to be a major motion picture,” and I have a feeling it was written to that end alone. I hope the movies can put flesh on the bones of Gifford’s story.



Seawitch, by Alistair MacLean (Double-day, $7.95).

Seawitch, Seawitch . . . where have I heard that before? MacLean used to write unashamedly sentimental thrillers – good ones. But he didn’t survive the end of the Cold War.

Here’s another one about an off-shore oil rig, and you can plot it yourself. Plot’s about all MacLean has, for his characters never once step into the realm of the human. There’s a love interest that’s not very interesting, as MacLean must have sensed because he doubles it, giving us a pair of private detectives in love with two sisters. Multiplication alone can’t make it work.

If I could legislate a moratorium on thriller topics, oil rig espionage would head the list, followed by OPEC dittor and true-fact, flat-voiced accounts of how something shocking happened. I have the dis-tinct impression that I fell asleep watching MacLean’s latest on TV a few weeks ago. Try South by Java Head or When Eight Bells Toll instead.



Quiet as a Nun, by Antonia Fraser (Viking, $8.95).

In her first venture into the mystery genre, the glamorous biographer of Mary, Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell sets up a novel reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Lady Antonia presents us with a brittle, successful heroine called back to the convent-school of her youth to investigate some unhappy events therein. But just when you’re ready to have the heroine straighten out her own life and solve the mystery as well – they’re closely related problems – Lady Antonia loses interest. Or, maybe she just ran out of ink. Whatever, all of a sudden a solution is deus ex machinated and a little adolescent rape fantasy thrown in for bad measure.

Plots without characters are accepted, though not admired, in the thriller world. Characters without plot aren’t. Lady Antonia, get to work.



Firefox, by Craig Thomas (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $8.95).

Thomas’ tale is the perfect example of a good thriller plot that doesn’t need, and can’t carry, characters. The first third of the novel is a tedious melange of self-sacrificing Russians who drop like flies to safeguard Freedom and our zombie-like hero who is the perfect fighting machine because . . . oh, who cares.

Thomas obviously doesn’t, for once his zombie has stolen the revolutionary Russian warplane, the author jettisons his literary pretensions and the chase begins.

The Red Baron never had it so good. The last two-thirds of Firefox are packed with suspense and action, as this totally amoral, apolitical novel whips to a close.



The Bulgarian Exclusive, by Anthony

Grey (Dial, $7.95).

I haven’t found anything good to say about this book. It’s watered-down Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but since Grey’s protagonist never seems alive, he might as well have stayed there. All one can say for Grey’s characters is that they’re pathetically stupid, while the novel doesn’t even achieve pathos. It’s just stupid.



The Peking Man Is Missing, by. Claire Taschdjian (Harper & Row, $10).

The bones of Peking Man, one of the major archeological discoveries of this century, disappeared in early December, 1941, at roughly the same time the Japanese occupied China. The Japanese inquiry into their whereabouts resulted in several suicides, but no bones. US military intelligence and the Chinese conducted less melodramatic, but equally fruitless searches. The People’s Republic of China is still looking. Since their reward figures in six figures, you might check your attic.

Taschdjian has grafted a fictional explanation onto this historic habeas corpus. Her plot, though packed with coincidences, is clever and believable. But her novel’s interesting only because it deals with an interesting topic. Her characters are either unintelligent and larcenous or just plain unintelligent. Not one of them is likeable or interesting. And worst of all, though Taschdjian lived in Peking during the Japanese occupation, her novel might as well be set in Lubbock for all the sense of time and place it offers.