I am now reading “The Honourable Schoolboy” written by John Le Carre in 1977 – a spy novel about an English agent spying in Hong Kong, Cambodia and Thailand. In 1989, John Le Carre wrote a “new” introduction to this novel, the second and middle book of the Karla trilogy. I reproduce the introduction below. INTRODUCTION JOHN LE CARRE July 1989 A clever English writer once remarked that he wrote in order to have something to read in his old age. At fifty – seven I have yet to count myself old, but there is no doubt that in the thirteen years since I began this book, history has aged perceptibly. Thirteen years ago the Soviet Union was still locked in the ice of a slothful and corrupt oligarchy, and the puritanically minded leaders of the new China had turned their backs on their old ally and mentor in contempt. Today it is the Soviet Union which is in the throes of redefining the great Proletarian Revolution, if there ever really was one, while the blood of heroic young Chinese men and women who asked peaceably for similar redefinition of their political identity lies thick on Tianamen Square, however many times the Army’s water – cannons try to wash it away. So if you read this book, be warned. You are reading an historical novel, written on the hoof, in a climate so altered that I for one would not know how to recapture any part of it if I were to try to tell you the same story in recollection today. There is another reason why I might be tempted back to this book in my old age, and that is its fragile recognition of the man I was at the time. The Honourable Schoolboy was the first book I wrote on location, and the first, but not the last, for which I put on the non – uniform of a field reporter in order to obtain my experiences and my information. It commemorates the first time I saw shots exchanged in the heat of battle, or succoured a wounded soldier, or smelt the stench of old blood in the fields. It tells therefore of a certain growing up, but also of a certain growing down, for war is nothing if not a return to childhood. Thus, when Jerry Westerby, my hero, takes his taxi – ride to the battle front a few kilometres outside Phnom Penh, and involuntarily finds himself behind Khmer Rouge lines, I was sitting much where he sat, in the same taxi, with my heart in my mouth, drumming my fingers on the same dashboard and offering the same prayers to my Maker. When Jerry visits an opium den or entrusts himself to the flying skills of an intoxicated Chinese opium pilot in an aeroplane that would not have passed muster in a scrap auction, he is the beneficiary of my own timid adventurings, which means only that in the space of a few months, I shared the perils that any good reporter will take in his stride in a single afternoon. I remember only one occasion when I chickened, but it does duty for those other occasions I have conveniently forgotten. With H.D.S. Greenway, then of the Washington Post, I was proposing to take a train from Nakhomphenom, in North – East Thailand, back to Bangkok. We had come from Laos and had been roughing it for a week. We had shared some rich but unnerving encounters in the insurgency area, not least with an American – trained Thai colonel of Special Forces whom you will meet in the later chapters of the book and who carried more armament on his person than anybody I have ever seen before or since. As we approached the ticket office, Greenway asked me wearily whether my quest for material required us to travel in the poorest part of the train. I was still hesitating when he came up with the solution: “Tell you what. We’ll travel First and leave smiley to sweat it out in Third.” And so we did, and consequently arrived in Bangkok in good enough shape to celebrate the publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Why else might I pick up this book ten years from now? The answer is like a sad smile in my memory. For the vanished Phnom Penh, the last of Joseph Conrad’s river ports to go to the devil. For the scent of cooking oil and night flowers and the clamour of the bullfrogs as we ate our ridiculously wonderful French – Khmer meals just a few miles from the predatory armies that were about to devastate the city. For the insinuating murmur of the street girls perched up in the backs of their cyclos, as they ticked past us in the hot dark. For the memory, in short, of the dying days of French colonialism, before the vengeance fo the terrible Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge swept it all away for good or bad. As to Hong Kong – is that all history too? Even as I write, Mrs. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary is in the Colony, bravely explaining why Britain can do nothing for a people she has dined off for a hundred and fifty years. Only betrayal, it seems, is timeless.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 06:47:27 +0000
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